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.

Identifying main ideas when they were implicit was difficult for all subjects across all text structures. Subjects of all ages identified explicit main ideas with far greater ease than implicit main ideas. Our findings indicate that both comparison/contrast and cause/effect texts (but not sequence texts) did pose greater difficulty for subjects than listing texts, corroborating others' findings with texts of the same of similar structures.

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