Children's Comprehension and Local-to-Global Recall of Narrative and Expository Texts

We examined underlying mechanisms for comprehension differences across expository and narrative text while controlling for factors confounded in the extant literature. Fourth grade students (n=32) read both an expository and a narrative text, and completed both a local comprehension assessment, and a global retelling assessment for each text. Children recalled more information from narrative than expository texts in the global processing task, but there was no difference in the local processing task. Our findings are consistent with psycholinguistic studies on the formation of mental models from text, and suggest that narrative structure may facilitate memory for global information even when local comprehension of exposition and narrative is equivalent. The relative importance of narrative and expository text in elementary reading curricula is a matter of considerable concern for both educators and researchers. Robust findings show that children tend to exhibit better reading comprehension for narrative than expository texts in formal assessments (Duke