Text comprehensibility and graphic organizers: Influences on reading to learn in sixth-grade social studies.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examined the effects of text revised for improved readability/coherence and a graphic organizer on sixth-graders' social studies content learning within the context of research-supported instructional support. Instruction was controlled so that treatments differed only in type of text and text aid. With the exception of main effects for reading ability, no statistically significant results were found, most likely due to underpowered statistical analyses. Recognizing the lack of power, effect sizes were considered to gain insight into trends in the data. Accordingly, trends suggest that, within the context of effective content literacy instruction, text comprehensibility improvements may have varying impact on content learning, depending on the reader's skills. For skilled readers, research-recommended instructional support throughout the reading process might compensate for comprehension difficulties due to low-coherence text. Notably, the trends of facilitative effects of revised texts for below-grade level readers suggest that texts are important to content instruction with struggling readers, particularly for long-term content learning. Trends in effect sizes present the possibility of delayed interactive effects of texts revised for improved coherence and text aids, a phenomenon that has not been investigated in previous text coherence research. Text aids in general, instead of text aids in particular, might facilitate text comprehension as suggested by the lack of statistically significant results differences in text aid effects; likewise, trends in the data suggest the possibility that certain text aids may be paired more successfully with particular types of texts and instructional contexts for improved text comprehension.