Comprehension challenges in the fourth grade: The roles of text cohesion, text genre, and readers’ prior knowledge

Abstract

We examined young readers’ comprehension as a function of text genre (narrative, science), textcohesion (high, low), and readers’ abilities (reading decoding skills and world knowledge). Theoverarching purpose of this study was to contribute to our understanding of the fourth grade slump.Children in grade 4 read four texts, including one high and one low cohesion text from each genre.Comprehension of each text was assessed with 12 multiple-choice questions and free and cued recall.Comprehension was enhanced by increased knowledge: high knowledge readers showed bettercomprehension than low knowledge readers and narratives were comprehended better than sciencetexts. Interactions between readers’ knowledge levels and text characteristics indicated that thechildren showed larger effects of knowledge for science than for narrative texts, and those with moreknowledge better understood the low cohesion, narrative texts, showing a reverse cohesion effect.Decoding skill benefited comprehension, but effects of text genre and cohesion depended less ondecoding skill than prior knowledge. Overall, the study indicates that the fourth grade slump is at leastpartially attributable to the emergence of complex dependencies between the nature of the text andthe reader’s prior knowledge. The results also suggested that simply adding cohesion cues, and notexplanatory information, is not likely to be sufficient for young readers as an approach to improvingcomprehension of challenging texts.

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