Developmental change in identifying main ideas in picture stories

JOURNAL

OF APPLIED

DEVELOPMENTAL

PSYCHOLOGY

7,325340

(1986)

Developmental Change in Identifying M&n Ideas in Picture Stories ADELAIDE BATES BINGHAM Beloit College

KAREN L. REMBOLD AND STEVEN R. YUSSEN Department of Educational Psychology University of Wisconsin-Madison

Although young children frequently have more difficulty in correctly identifying main ideas than do older children and adults, the reasons underlying this difference in performance have usually not been investigated. The present study was designed to formulate a task involving both the form and content of good moin ideas, so that the development of skills used in their identification could be examined in greater detail. Four categories of moin idea statements were developed from a joint theory combining research on story grammar kernels with research on summarization rules. These categories were then applied to a series of simple narrotives from the WISC-R picture arrangement task. College students (Experiment 1) and 2nd, 5th, and 8th grade students (Experiment 2) examined the narratives and ronk ordered the four olternatives for each story. It was found that adults confirmed the predicted ordering of the olternatives and that, with age, children improved in their identification of the best main idea statement, and developed in their ability to distinguish both between important and unimportant story elements and between superordinate and subordinate types of stotements.

The ability to identify the main idea of a story has long been thought to be an important index of how well children have comprehended it (e.g., Baumann, 1984; Brown & Smiley, 1977; Otto & Barrett, 1966; Thorndike, 1917; Yussen, 1982). Put most simply, if you can identify the main idea, you understand what the writer or speaker is trying to get across. Stories are important forms of prose, because they are used to instruct children in the early grades of school and because all of us encounter them in discourse so frequently. The assessment of skill in identifying main ideas has long been part of standardized assessments of

We thank the administrators, teachers, and children at Blessed Sacrament and St. Dennis schools in Madison, Wisconsin for their gracious help and cooperation in the study. The research reported in this paper was funded by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research which is supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of Education (Grant No. NIE-G-81-0009). The opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the National Institute of Education. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Steven R. Yussen, University of Wisconsin, 1025 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706.

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reading achievement (e.g., Woodcock, 1973). More recently, cognitive psychologists have tried to understand how main ideas reflect children’s information processing skills and levels of text representation (e.g., Baumann, 1984; Brown & Day, 1980; Guindon & Kintsch, 1984; Stein & Trabasso, 1982). The purpose of the present investigation was to explore the often observed pattern in the assessment and research literature on this topic: namely, that older elementary school children and adults generally outperform younger children in virtually any task designed to measure skill at identifying main ideas. That older children outperform younger ones is hardly a novel finding in developmental psychology. However, what is always informative is to understand why a difference occurs. Is there some consistent difference in the way children approach a problem or represent it to themselves, which accounts for the differences noted? In the present circumstance, we postulated that children of different ages may focus on different types of prose information when they try to identify the main idea of a story. From an adult perspective, some types of information conform to a logically better distillation of a narrative than do others. For example, if there are several propositions in a narrative, a statement which subsumes several of these propositions is a better main idea alternative than one which is associated with only a single proposition. To the extent that children identify the alternatives which fit the adult conception of a “good main idea,” scholars generally credit them with success at the task. However, children’s other responses may well exhibit an orderly and sensible pattern as well. The goal of the research, then, was to trace the developmental shifts in the patterns of responses offered by children when faced with a concrete task designed to assess their identification of main ideas in simple narratives. At a theoretical level, such an analysis was expected to illuminate the nature of changes in children’s narrative comprehension skills. At a practical level, we believed that this information would be helpful to the many educators who continually apply and refine the extensive set of published exercises for teaching children how to identify main ideas in stories (e.g., Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985; Baumann, 1984). If it can be shown, for example, that some children become captured by certain elements of a story when trying to formulate a main idea, then a useful instructional approach may be to focus on just this sort of information and explain what a.slightly better option is and why? In order to accomplish our goal, we created a task based on a synthesis of two theoretical models in narrative prose research. This theoretical synthesis (to be described below) allows us to specify what information should be contained in a “very good” statement of a story’s main idea, and to identify successively poorer alternatives departing from the ideal one. We chose a multiple choice framework for our task in order to be able to readily compare patterns of responses within and across grades, as well as to minimize the cognitive demands that would have been placed on children had they been required to produce main ideas spontaneously. We chose a set of pictorial stimuli to remove the variable of

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verbal decoding skill in the encoding of the stories to be evaluated, and further minimized reliance on decoding skills by allowing students to both read, and hear aloud, the verbal statements representing the various main idea alternatives. ’ Finally, we chose a widely used and standardized set of stories to ensure that they would be comprehensible to the age groups that were tested.2 Theory Two lines of inquiry that have been influential in the area of main idea summarization have been the theory and research concerning story grammars (e.g., Rumelhart, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979; Yussen, Mathews, Buss, & Kane, 1980) and that concerning “macro-structures” (e.g., Brown & Day, 1980; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Kintsch & Yarbrough, 1982). It is the combination of these two theoretical models that has provided the rationale underlying the construction of the multiple choice alternatives in the present study. From the story grammar research, we utilized the notion of a story “kernel,” which consists of the particular story grammar categories that were found by Yussen, Mathews, Buss, and Kane (1980) to be judged most salient by adults and to be most easily remembered by children. Yussen et.al. used Stein and Glenn’s (1979) grammar in their study, and found that the kernel of a short story consisted of the Initiating Event, the Attempt, and the Consequence. In other words it appeared to be the action elements of the story that formed the salient kernel of the story for children and adults alike. See Table 1 for a story formulated according to the Stein and Glenn grammar in which the kernel sequence is underlined. (See also Yussen, 1982, for a further analysis of this work.) From the line of inquiry concerning macro-structures, we were influenced by the rules developed by Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) for determining central meaning in text and other cognitive domains. These macro-rules follow: (1) generalize to superordinate concepts from a series of subordinate concepts; (2) delete irrelevant information; (3) integrate information across propositions; and ‘Although the underlying mechanisms of both the story grammars and summarization rules may be nonverbal abstractions, research to date on both of these constructs has dealt almost exclusively with verbal propositions. *One reviewer of the manuscript raised a substantive conFern that while we opted to use pictures to simplify the task for the children ultimately tested in Experiment 2, there might well be developmental changes in the ability of children to decode pictures containing event sequences.While plausible, this conjecture is probably false based on data we collected with these picture stories in several earlier studies reported in Yussen (1982). Children from 2nd through 7th grades were asked to tell us what was happening in each of the same picture sequences used hem under a variety of conditions. In all, over 100 children were tested in several separate investigations. Though there were some striking age/grade related developments in the children’s story telling structures, it was equally clear that the 2nd graders had no difficulty stating unambiguously what each picture in a story sequence portrayed in the way of an action, setting, or condition. In fact, we were struck by how easy this decoding task was, and the relative simplicity eventually led us to use the picture sets in the present study.

328

BINGHAM, REMBOLD, AND YUSSEN TABLE 1 Stein and Glenn’s Grammar Applied to a Sample Story

Category Setting Initiating event

1. 2. 3.

4. Internal response Attempt Consequence Reaction

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Once there was a big gray fish named Albert. He lived in a big icy pond near the edge of a forest. One day Albert was swimming around the pond. Then he spotted a big juicy worm on top of the water. Albert knew how delicious worms tasted. He wanted to eat that one for his dinner. So he swam very close to the worm. Then he bit into him. Suddenly, Albert was pulled through the water into the boat. He had been caught by a fisherman. Albert felt sad. He wished he had been more careful.

Adapted from Stein & Glenn (1979, Figures

1 and 2, pp. 60 and 61).

“An Analysis of Story

Comprehensionin Elementary School Children.” (4) construct information at a global level based on information at a less-global level. Brown and Day (1980) have applied these rules to text summarization and found them to be helpful in distinguishing between the paragraph summaries of experts (rhetoric teachers) and nonexperts (5th, 7th, lOth-grade, and collegelevel students). In developing the multiple choice test for the present study, results from the summarization research (emphasizing processes) and from the research on story grammar kernels (emphasizing products) were both taken into consideration. Clearly, picture stories are not perfectly interpretable in terms of the current story grammars. But the concept of action as the most salient characteristic in a narrative is immediately applicable to picture stories, and provided a concrete direction for our task construction. Similarly, since guidelines have not emerged for the production of main ideas in picture stories, Kintsch and van Dijk’s rules were useful in our task construction because theoretically they apply to cognitive domains other than text. Specifically, in identifying a main idea for a picture story, we reasoned that an observer would have to: (1) generalize to superordinate concepts from the subordinate concepts represented by the individual pictures; (2) delete irrelevant or overlapping information in the pictorial sequence; (3) integrate information across pictures; and (4) construct information at a global level based on information found at the less-global or single picture level. Presumably the resulting main idea would take the form of a superordinate statement which integrated the important concepts found in the picture story. Accordingly, it was determined that the multiple choice items would have to

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incorporate both a dimension related to important/unimportant content, and a dimension related to superordinate/subordinate form. As a result, two of the items emphasize important story content (i.e., relevant action) and two emphasize unimportant story content (i.e., the setting or an incorrect action). Simultaneously, two of the items take the form of an integrated, superordinate statement, and two take the form of a more detailed statement. The overlap of these two sets of criteria results in the following four types of multiple choice items: (1) an integrated, superordinate statement emphasizing relevant story action, which we regard as the main idea statement; (2) a subordinate statement detailing a single aspect of relevant story action; (3) a subordinate statement detailing a single unimportant aspect of the story, such as the setting; and (4) an integrated, superordinate statement emphasizing unimportant story content. For this last type of item, we constructed statements describing incorrect story action because we wanted to make a distinction between information that was clearly unimportant to the story, and information that was merely detailed. See Figure 1 for an example of these four types of items and the corresponding picture story. From the research and theory on summarization rules, combined with the research on story kernels, we predicted that the first type of statement listed above (an integrated superordinate statement of important elements) would be chosen by mature comprehenders as the best statement of the story’s main idea. And from the research on story kernels we predicted that the second type of statement, which concerns an important but detailed element, would be chosen as better than the remaining two, which describe relatively unimportant elements. Neither theory makes a firm prediction concerning the superiority of the third versus the fourth type of statement, that is, a subordinate statement detailing an unimportant element versus a superordinate statement integrating information that is not present in the story. Intuition suggests, however, that true, albeit less salient, information should be judged as more representative of the story than inaccurate information, in spite of its form. Experiment 1 was conducted in order to test the validity of these theoretical predictions in a group of adults. Experiment 2 examined the responses of several groups of children.

EXPERIMENT

1

The purpose of Experiment 1 was to determine whether or not mature comprehenders would rank the main idea alternatives in accordance with the theoretical predictions. College students from 4-year colleges have been found to use summarization rules spontaneously and effectively when producing their own text summarizes (Brown & Day, 1980). Since identification tasks are generally considered to be easier than production tasks (e.g., Flavell, 1985), members of this group were considered to be good candidates for distinguishing between the inferior and superior main ideas in our identification task.

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MAIN IDEAS IN STORIES

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Method Subjects. Twenty students from a large midwestem university participated in Experiment 1. Approximately half of the students were males and half were females. All of the subjects were native English speakers, white, and of middleclass socio-economic status (SES). Procedure. Each subject was given a booklet containing ten pages and a direction sheet. On each of the ten pages was a picture story from the WISC-R picture arrangement task (Wechsler, 1974) and four alternatives for the story’s main idea. See Figure 1 for a sample item from the task. The subjects were instructed to look at each picture story and then rank order the main idea alternatives from best (#l) to worst (#4). A main idea was defined as “a sentence which tells briefly what is happening in the story, or what the story is about.” Subjects were given an unlimited amount of time to perform the task, and most were finished within lo-15 minutes. Analysis and Results. For simplicity and clarity, the four types of main idea statements are referred to respectively as levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 (see, e.g., Table 2), with 1 and 4 representing the “best” and “worst” alternatives, respectively. The 40 rank values for each subject (four for each story) were averaged across the four categories to provide four average ranks per subject. These average ranks were, in turn, rank ordered and then averaged across subjects. In order to determine whether or not the mean rank orders of the average ranks for the various alternatives were significantly different from one another, a series of six Friedman planned contrasts (Marascuilo & McSweeney, 1977) was performed at an a level of .05 (for the entire set) to examine all of the possible pairwise combinations (i.e., level 1 vs. level 2, level 2 vs. level 3, etc.). This resulted in each individual contrast being performed at an (Y level of .008. The resulting means of the rank-ordered average ranks (which will be referred to simply as mean ranks) can be found in Table 2. As can be seen, the alternatives were ordered, on the average, exactly as predicted. (Given the 24 different ways that these four categories can be ordered,

Summary

of Friedman

Level 1 Integrated Important M

1.ooa

TABLE 2 Planned Contrasts Testing Differences in Adults’ Mean Ranks of Main Idea Alternatives Level 2 Unintegrated Important 2.00

Level 3 Unintegrated Unimportant 3.30

Level 4 Integrated Unimportant 3.70

=N = 20 for each mean, and each of the 20 values, in turn, is based on ten observations.

332

BINGHAM, REMBOLD, AND YUSSEN

the probability of obtaining the predicted order by chance alone is less than .05.) The results of the Friedman contrasts indicated a significant difference between the mean ranks of the level 1 alternative and all of the other alternatives (t, = 2.45 for comparison with level 2, t, = 5.63 for comparison with level 3, and t, = 6.61 for comparison with level 4; p < .008 for each value). A significant difference was also found between the mean ranks of the level 2 alternative and the level 3 and level 4 alternatives (t, = 3.18, t, = 4.16, respectively; p < .008 for each value). Finally, no significant difference was found between the mean ranks of the level 3 alternative and the level 4 alternative (tm = .98, p > .008). When the mean ranks for each individual subject are correlated with the predicted rank values by means of Kendall’s tau (Marascuilo & McSweeney, 1977), the average tau is equal to .90, with a standard deviation of .16.

Discussion The results from Experiment 1 indicate that the predicted rank ordering of main idea alternatives on the basis of story grammar kernels and summarization rules is perceived as valid by a group of mature comprehenders. On items where the theories make clear predictions, there is no disagreement among the adult rankings. And on items where the theories do not make a clear prediction there is disagreement among adult judgments. In general, adults confirm the prediction that, of the four types of main idea alternatives made available to them, the superordinate action statement (level 1) is the best main idea, the subordinate action statement (level 2) is the second best, the subordinate setting statement (level 3) is third, and the inaccurate superordinate statement (level 4) is worst. However, the last two alternatives are not sharply distinguished from one another.

EXPERIMENT 2 Having established the order in which mature comprehenders ranked the four types of alternatives for main ideas, we turned to the major purpose of the investigation: an examination of the development of children’s ability to identify main ideas. Based on earlier research we expected younger children to perform more poorly on an identification task than older children and adults. In addition, however, we sought to explore the nature of these developmental changes by examining the patterns of rankings elicited from children of different ages. In order to assess a relatively wide variety of developmental patterns, we selected children from three age groups to represent a broad range of prose comprehension skills, covering the early elementary school period of learning to read and comprehend (2nd grade), the later elementary period (5th grade), and the middle school period (8th grade). Finally, since “getting the gist” is universally cited as a central part of

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reading comprehension, we also arranged to assess the relationship between our main idea task and a standardized measure of reading comprehension. Method Subjects. Seventy-five children from two parochial schools in the Madison, Wisconsin area participated in Experiment 2. Of these children, 25 were in the 2nd grade (average age = 7: 1 l), 25 were in the 5th grade (average age = 10: 1 l), and 25 were in the 8th grade (average age = 13:9). There were approximately equal numbers of boys and girls at each grade level. All subjects were native English speakers, white, and ranged from lower-middle to upper-middle-class in SES. Procedure. Each child was administered the same task that was administered to adults in Experiment 1, although the procedure was varied somewhat for the 2nd and 5th graders, as described later.3 In addition, recent scores were available for performance on the reading comprehension subtest of the California Reading Achievement Test for all but ten 2nd graders and two 8th graders. These reading comprehension tests had all been administered within one’ academic year of the present experiment. For the 8th graders, experimental testing was done in small groups of two to four students. Eighth graders received the same booklet and direction sheet that had been provided for adults. A main idea was once again defined as “a sentence which tells briefly what is happening in the story, or what the story is about,” and students were directed to look at each picture story and then rank order the main idea alternatives from best (# 1) to worst (#4). The 8th graders were encouraged to ask for help with any unfamiliar words and, like the adults, were allowed an unlimited amount of time to finish the task. Most students were finished within 15 minutes. For the 2nd and 5th graders, experimental testing was done on an individual basis. Directions were given orally and were altered somewhat in order to: (a)

31n developmental research, it often seems feasible to present children of very disparate ages with a procedure suited to their general skill and test-taking experiences, particularly when slight procedural differences are thought to be trivial influences on the phenomenon in question. When this is done, caution must be exercised in drawing inferences, lest the minor procedural differences obscure or confound the apparent developmental effect in question. In the present case the task was made more individualized for 2nd and 5th graders than it was for 8th graders or the adults tested in Experiment 1. Additionally, choices were eliminated from further consideration for the two younger grades, after each choice was made. We assumed the 8th graders and adults could easily keep previously chosen alternatives separate from as yet to be chosen alternatives. These procedural differences acted as a conservative hedge against our expected developmental outcomes, and. if anything, made the developmental changes obtained less pronounced than they might have been with exact parallelism of testing across grades.

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accommodate the one-to-one testing format; (b) minimize the intellectual task of keeping rank orders in mind as alternatives were examined; and (c) eliminate alternatives as soon as they were rated. 4 In addition, 2nd and 5th graders were given a practice item in order to illustrate the ranking procedure. Students were allowed to examine each picture story and its corresponding main idea alternatives for as long as they wished. In order to minimize decoding or word recognition errors, each alternative was read aloud, simultaneously, by the student and the experimenter. Results. Three separate analyses were conducted on the students’ rank orderings of the four main idea alternatives. For each analysis, we took a conservative perspective in setting significance levels, by treating each set of planned comparisons as a “family” of statistical comparisons and dividing the alpha level equally among the individual comparisons. This reduces “experiment-wise” error in inferring significant effects, and is advocated by a number of contemporary statisticians. In one analysis, a count was made of the number of stories, out of a possible ten, for which a student chose the level 1 alternative as the best main idea. This value was considered to be the “number correct” on the basis of both theoretical predictions and adult responses in Experiment 1. These correct response scores were then averaged within grades and three Dunn pairwise contrasts were performed, comparing 2nd and 5th graders, 5th and 8th graders, and 2nd and 8th graders. All three contrasts were performed at an overall level of .05, so that the (Ylevel for each individual contrast was .017. The second analysis consisted of correlating each student’s number of correct responses with his or her score on the reading comprehension subtest of the California Reading Achievement Test. A correlation coefficient was computed for each grade, and then tested for significance at an (Y level of .05. For the third analysis, the ranks assigned to the four types of alternatives were averaged across all ten stories for each subject. This resulted in each student having a score for each of the four categories (i.e., levels 1, 2, 3, and 4). In order to examine the ordering of the four alternatives at each grade level, the average ranks for each student were themselves rank ordered and averaged within grades. All six Friedman pairwise contrasts were then conducted, as in Experiment 1, with an overall CYof .05 for each grade and an OLlevel of .008 for each individual contrast. For the first analysis outlined above, the means and standard deviations of the

4The procedure involved showing a child the written alternative statements for each story on separate slips of paper, having the child pick the best main idea, eliminating the alternative chosen, and again asking the child to select the best main idea-this time from only the statements which remained. The procedure was repeated three times in all until only one slip of paper remained. The order of selecting main ideas dictated the numerical ranks assigned to them.

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TABLE 3 Means and Standard Deviations of the Number of Correct Responses for Second, Fifth, and Eighth Grade Students Grade

M SD

2

5

8

Adults b

3.72a 2.15

5.04 2.56

7.08 2.18

4.20 1.30

aN = 25 for each M, and each of the 25 values, in turn, is based on 10 observations. Vhese results are from Experiment 1 and so were not analyzed formally in a statistical analysis. They are presented for the reader’s information, only. number of correct responses can be found in Table 3. The results of the three Dunn pairwise contrasts on these scores demonstrated a significant difference between the number of correct responses for 2nd graders versus 8th graders (f, = 3.13, p < .017), and for 5th graders versus 8th graders (f, = 5.16, y < .017), but not for 2nd graders versus 5th graders (t, = 2.03, p > .017). With regard to the second set of analyses, the correlations between the number of correct main idea choices and the reading comprehension subtest scores were found to be significantly different from zero for 5th graders (r = .62, p < .05) and for 8th graders (r = .50, p < .05), but not for 2nd graders (r = - .15, p > .05). In other words, correct responses on the main idea task were found to be positively correlated with reading comprehension test performance for 5th and 8th graders, but no significant correlation was found for 2nd graders. The results from the third set of analyses, concerning the differences between the alternative mean ranks, can be found in Table 4. For 2nd graders the level 1 and level 2 ranks are not significantly different from one another (t, = .97, p > .008), and neither are the level 1 and level 3 ranks (t, = 1.64, p > .008). On the other hand, the level 1 and level 4 ranks (r, = 4.16, p < .008), the level 2 TABLE 4 Summary of Friedman Planned Contrasts Testing Within-Grade Differences in Average Rank Orders of Main Idea Alternatives for Second, Fifth, and Eighth Graders Level 1

Grade 2nd 5th 8th

Integrated Important 2.06 1.82 1.14

Level 2 Unintegrated Important

Level 3 Unintegrated Unimportant

Level 4 Integrated Unimportant

1.70

2.66 2.58 3.28

3.58 3.84 3.58

1.76 2.00

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and level 3 ranks (r, = 2.63, p < .008), the level 2 and level 4 ranks (r, = 5.15, p < .008), and the level 3 and level 4 ranks (t, = 2.52, p -=c.008) are all significantly different from one another. The results for the 5th grade indicate no differences between any of the pairwise combinations of the level 1, level 2, and level 3 ranks (?_ = .16 for level 1 and level 2: t, = 2.08 for level 1 and level 3; t, = 2.25 for level 2 and level 3; p > .008 for each value). However, significant differences were found between the level 4 rank and each of the three other ranks (t, = 5.53 for level 1 vs. level 4; t, = 5.70 for level 2 vs. level 4; t, = 3.45 for level 3 vs. level 4: p < .008 for each value). For the 8th graders, no significant differences were found for the level 1 and level 2 ranks (r, = 2.35, p > .008) or for the level 3 and level 4 ranks (t, = .82, p > .008). All of the remaining pairwise combinations of ranks, however, were significantly different from one another (t, = 5.86 for level 1 and level 3; t, = 6.68 for level 1 and level 4; t, = 3.51 for level 2 and level 3; r, = 4.33 for level 2 and level 4: p < .008 for each value). Discussion The results of Experiment 2 lead to several important conclusions concerning the present main idea task and the development of main idea skills in elementary school aged children. First of all, the results of the correlational tests indicate that, at least for 5th and 8th graders, the main idea task that we had developed is positively correlated with reading comprehension skills. Such a relation is consistent with the view that being able to extract the “gist” of an event is an important skill in reading. The failure to find such a relation among second graders has many possible explanations and it is not easy to discriminate among them. The second conclusion is that older school children appear to be able to identify correctly more main ideas then elementary school children. This conclusion is not surprising, but is important in that it replicates the findings of earlier research (e.g., Otto, Barrett, & Koenke, 1969; Otto & Koenke, 1970). The third set of conclusions suggested by Experiment 2 is by far the most interesting because it provides insight into why younger students appear to be poorer main idea comprehenders. The results of the Friedman contrasts suggest a slightly different pattern of choices among the various main idea alternatives at each of the three ages tested. From these results, a developmental pattern begins to emerge which is helpful in explaining why main idea identification improves with age. For the 2nd graders, the first preferences for main ideas are the level 2 and level 1 alternatives, which are not ranked as significantly different from one another. The second preferences are the level 1 and level 3 alternatives, which are not ranked as significantly different. And, as we have seen, the level 3 alternative is ranked as significantly worse than the level 2 alternative. Given this

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pattern of findings, that is, that level 2 = level 1, and level 1 = level 3, but that level 2 < level 3, it is clear that the 2nd graders are actually ordering these alternatives so that the subordinate action statement is best, the superordinate action statement is second best, and the subordinate setting statement is third. And since the level 4 alternative is consistently ranked as significantly worse than the other alternatives, the 2nd graders have ranked the superordinate incorrect statement as the worst. In terms of the joint theory discussed in the introduction, these results indicate that the 2nd graders have difficulty in distinguishing both between important and unimportant events in the story, and between superordinate and subordinate statements concerning the important story action. In addition, the results indicate that 2nd graders prefer an important detail as the best representation of a story’s main idea. For the 5th graders, the first preferences for the main idea are the level 1, level 2, and level 3 alternatives, none of which is rated as significantly different from one another. The last preference is the level 4 alternative, which is rated as significantly worse than the other three, alternatives. In terms of our theoretical model, these results suggest that although 5th graders do not continue to prefer an important detail for a story’s best main idea, as do 2nd graders, they nevertheless continue to have difficulty in distinguishing both between important and unimportant events in the story, and between superordinate and subordinate statements concerning the important story action. For the 8th graders, the first preferences for the main idea are the level 1 and level 2 alternatives, which are not distinguished from one another. The last preferences for the main idea are the level 3 and level 4 alternatives, also which are not distinguished from one another. In terms of the theoretical model, these results suggest that, like the 2nd and 5th graders, 8th graders seem to have difficulty distinguishing between superordinate and subordinate statements concerning the story action. Unlike the two groups of younger students, however, 8th graders appear to be able to distinguish successfully between important and unimportant events in short stories, and, like adults, they do not indicate a clear preference for either integrated or unintegrated structures concerning unimportant story events.

GENERAL

CONCLUSIONS

The experimental measure created to establish how children discriminate among prose statements bearing on a story’s central meaning proved informative in two ways. First of all, it demonstrated that predictions of adult performance, based on combined research from the story grammar and macroproposition models, (e.g., Kintsch & Yarbrough, 1982; Stein & Trabasso 1982) are supported in an identification task that minimizes dependence on both decoding and production skills. Secondly, it has provided a means of identifying, by way of a systematic and theoretically-based task, what types of main idea alternatives are ranked as

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AND YUSSEN

similar and different by individuals of various ages. In this fashion, an identification task provides information that a production task cannot because: (1) it allows comparisons to be made between different age groups concerning the exact same set of response options, and (2) it provides insight into individuals’ reactions not only to desirable responses, but also to less desirable ones. From the results of the present study, we can see the emergence of a developmental trend in how propositions are ranked according to two properties that vary across alternatives-importance level (unimportant, important) and superordination (superordinate, subordinate). In Experiment 2, we see that younger students apparently have difficulty distinguishing between important and unimportant story information, and between superordinate and subordinate statements as well, to the extent that 2nd graders choose an important but detailed statement as the best choice for a main idea. With an increase in age, however, the distinction between important and unimportant information becomes clearer, although the lack of distinction between superordinate and subordinate structures is still evident among 8th graders. In Experiment 1, we see that even this confusion is no longer evident among college students, who unanimously choose integrated action statements as the best main idea, and detailed action statements as second best. It is only within the two categories of unimportant story information that adults do not distinguish between superordinate and subordinate types of main idea statements. These results emphasize the joint importance of content (i.e., important vs. unimportant events) and structure (i .e . , superordinate integrations vs. subordinate details) in conceptualizing research and developing teaching strategies related to main idea skills. In particular, the present results indicate that young children have difficulties with both the form and content of main idea statements in a way that older students and adults do not. This study, of course, deals with receptive understanding. Subjects are asked to make judgments about the quality of various statements proffered as “main ideas” for the narratives depicted. However, it may well be that the same factors of content and structure figure prominently in the production of main ideas. Although we believe along with others (e.g., Baumann, 1984; Hare & Bingham 1985) that the ability to comprehend main ideas is not a single skill, but rather a set of skills, we also think it is useful to search for underlying principles and organizing factors that explain a range of related phenomena. It is an empirically open question, but a provocative possibility that the very same difficulties children encounter in rating main ideas would crop up when they are faced with a task of writing main idea statements. If such a result is evidenced in the appropriate extension of the present investigation, then reading teachers have some strong clues available about good targets for instruction that could encompass both writing and reading in an integrated fashion (e.g., Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). Recommendations about the form for ideal instruction to learn better the “main ideas” in written discourse does not follow directly from these findings of

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course. However, we note that discovery learning (e.g., Bamett, 1984; Pearson & Johnson, 1978) can be consistently used with the insights gleaned here concerning the locus of children’s difficulties. For example, Hare and Bingham (1985) developed an approach to discovery learning emphasizing key concepts to be acquired in learning how to identify main ideas in text. Two of these key concepts are: (1) recognizing that a one-to-one correspondence between main ideas and texts does not always exist, and (2) understanding how the systematic structural differences between narrative and expository texts influence the selection of main ideas. To teach the former concept, Hare and Bingham (1985) advocate an instructional approach referred to as developing a blueprint. A blueprint consists of the general prior knowledge all children are thought to have about what stories are like in general (e.g., Stein & Trabasso, 1982). The story schema is objectified by outlining its major parts on a blackboard and children are taken through a series of activities to examine, define, and exemplify each part. By so doing, the children come to see that single parts often have multiple text propositions associated with them, and some text is not clearly linked to any major story part. To teach the second concept, Hare and Bingham (1985) advocate developing a blueprint for the expository structure often described as comparison/contrast, found prominently in essays, historical descriptions, and news articles. Since many children are unfamiliar with this structure (e.g., it is not a frequent form in the oral discourse they experience) it must be taught, directly. Once the structure is understood, it can be used to evaluate sample texts, much as the blueprint procedure described above for analyzing narratives. The goal here is for children to fathom an alternative to the structure of stories and to see that what constitutes a main idea may differ substantially from one prose form to another. The lesson thereby learned helps them unglue from specific propositions in a text and consider its larger meaning.

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