Hare, V. C., Rabinowitz, M., & Schieble, K. M. (1989). Text effects on main idea comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 24(1), 72-88.

Hare, V.; Rabinowitz, M.; Schieble, K.

1989

Hare, V. C., Rabinowitz, M., & Schieble, K. M. (1989). Text effects on main idea comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 24(1), 72-88.

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This study examined the effects of selected text features on students' main idea comprehension. In Study 1, 75 4th, 78 6th, and 107 11th graders in the US identified the main contrived instructional texts and less constrained texts like those in content area textbooks. In Study 2, Ss identified the main ideas of texts of 4 different structures: listing, sequence, cause/effect, and comparison/contrast. In half of the texts of each structure, the main idea was explicit; in the other half, it was implicit. Results show that Ss inferred significantly fewer correct main ideas for the less constrained texts than for the contrived texts.

Students provided with LIST texts, which required application only of a single mapping rule (selection or construction of the main idea), were more successful at identifying the main idea than those provided with LIST+ texts, which required application of an additional mapping rule (deletion of nonsupporting ideas). Also, students were better able to abstract the main idea when it was presented in the first sentence of the text. However, we did not find the predicted interaction between text and main idea sentence position.

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