Rating the Importance of Structural Units of Prose Passages: A Problem of Metacognitive Development

TLDR

The study investigates how children and adults evaluate the importance of structural units in prose passages, highlighting a metacognitive development problem. Twenty participants at each of four age groups (8, 10, 12, and 18 years) rated linguistic units of prose passages for their importance to overall structure and theme. College students and seventh‑grade children largely agreed on importance ratings, whereas third‑ and fifth‑graders could not differentiate, and recall was strongly linked to units rated as most important, indicating a metacomprehension issue in younger children.

Abstract

BROWN, ANN L., and SMILEY, SANDRA S. Rating the Importance of Structural Units of Prose Passages. A Problem of Metacognitive Development. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1-8. 20 subjects at each of 4 age levels (8, 10, 12, and 18) rated the linguistic units of prose passages in terms of their importance to the structure and theme of the passages as a whole. There was considerable agreement among independent groups of college students and seventh-grade children concerning these importance ratings, but thirdand fifth-grade subjects were unable to differentiate items in terms of their relative importance to the text. Recall of the text material was determined by the adults' ratings of structural importance. At all ages, the units judged most important dominated recall attempts, while the least important units were rarely recalled. The failure of the younger children to identify the important elements of the text suggests a problem of metacomprehension that could be a contributing factor to their poor study habits.