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New texts in the content areas and a constructivist understanding of comprehension demand new emphases in instruction in the content areas. Textbook changes are examined, and helpful teaching suggestions are offered.

A walk through the children's section of a bookstore will show you-children's books have changed. There is a new richness everywhere in literature for children. With choices in all of the genres-how-to books, cookbooks, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction-these works now represent more cultural perspectives and more reading levels than ever before. The fastest growing new area in children's publishing is the information book. Thanks to authors and publishers who are committed to creating children's books about volcanoes and vultures, penguins and pilgrims, shipwrecks and sharks, we have abundant evidence now that information for children can be presented with intellectual honesty, creativity, and flair.

Patricia Lauber, author of award-winning science books for children, writes science with a point of view, a deep caring for the earth (Lauber, 1992). Newbery medalist Russell Freedman (1993), author of biographies and photo essays for children, sees himself as a storyteller, telling a story that is worthy of the telling, with style and language that does it justice. Many of these expertly crafted books for children are also visually appealing, with a wide variety of text type, illustrations, diagrams, and charts complementing and extending the text. Editors of content area textbooks seem to be taking a lesson. New science textbooks aspire to match the trade book models.

As texts have changed, our thinking about comprehension of texts has reached consensus. Comprehension is not just finding, answering, or recognizing. Comprehension is building understanding, both of a particular text and of the more global concepts around which it is built. It is an active and demanding process, especially when children are reading to learn new and difficult concepts. It is time that we examine texts in the instructional context in which they are used so that teachers can craft comprehension instruction that builds bridges between the demands of the texts and the needs of their children.

New texts in the content areas and a constructive understanding of comprehension may demand new emphases in instruction in the content areas. To illustrate this, several fourth-grade children with whom I recently worked will help me to compare and contrast textbook chapters, one published in 1992 and the other in 1995 by the same publisher. These texts, which to me illustrate traditional and new formats for children's science textbooks, are very different in terms of their structure and organization. Next, I will explore comprehension theories that help to explain children's responses to these texts as they try to build a personal understanding. In light of what I see in the new texts, what the children's interviews have told me, and a view of comprehension as a constructivist process, I will share some ideas about teaching with such texts. My goal is to provide classroom teachers some insight into the demands of new science texts and some suggestions for teaching with these texts.

Changes in textbooks

Studies of science texts have focused on the big picture of how well these texts train (or, more likely, fail to train) future scientists, the role texts have in controlling the science curriculum, and the way that texts describe scientific thinking (Stinner, 1995). Readability and comprehensibility have been studied by examining the cohesiveness of the language and concepts (Beck & Dole, 1992). Unfortunately, though, reviews do not address all of these issues at the same time. What teachers need are reviews of texts that evaluate static characteristics of texts and active use of texts in teachers' instruction and children's understanding. My fourth-grade assistants will bring that active perspective into this work.

I was interested in changes in AddisonWesley's science series for third grade, and I selected a textbook published in 1992, which seemed to me a good, traditional textbook, and one published in 1995, a good, new textbook. I did not intend to evaluate the merits of these two books against one another; in fact, I think both are good. I simply want to highlight the ties that teachers can make between the demands of the text and their comprehension instruction. Figure 1 gives a preview of the differences that I noticed.

Looking at general format. The most obvious difference between the two texts is the package. In 1992, Addison-Wesley produced a traditional textbook for the third grade: a hardbound volume of four units, divided into 13 chapters. Matthew (all students' names are pseudonyms), in fact, found this format daunting: "That looks like a fifth grader one, don't it?" In 1995, for format was pseudotrade book. What had once been a unit embedded within a hardbound text was now a paperback, standalone book. When I had the children examine texts, I put the 1995 volume in a group with three science trade books, and none of the children noticed that it was a textbook. That trade book packaging might have appealed to Matthew.

Looking at organization. Textbooks traditionally use organizational features to guide the reader's learning. Britton, Gulgoz, and Glynn (1993) call these features (and other linguistic features that guide understanding) "construction instructions" because they give the readers clues for building an understanding. The construction instructions are the information skeleton, and they are marked from the beginning through the table of contents, the chapter titles, the section headings, and the publisher's use of typefaces and type size to set parts of the text apart.

These two texts have similar construction instructions, including headings and subheadings, preview and review questions, boldfaced vocabulary words, and illustrations. Those features might appeal to students like Alexa, who seemed very comfortable with the format of the 1992 text. When I asked her to choose from a set of trade books and textbooks to tell me which was best for learning about science, she chose the textbook. She said, "To learn you would need this book." "Why?" I asked. "Because you could know what they're talking about, because of the big words [bold]. When you read the paragraphs you can find the big words, and all you got to do is look on the side and you can find out." Alexa recognized a particular construction instruction visually and also metacognitively, as she knew how she could use boldface vocabulary words to learn.

Although the visible construction instructions in these two texts are similar, the organization of information is very different. The 1992 text uses a predictable, linear format, which lends itself well to a traditional outline, as seen in Figure 2.

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The older text chapter has a clear, repetitive format, and the subtopics within each lesson are clearly subordinate to the main lesson focus.

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The newer text takes a less linear structure. Figure 3 shows a web that represents ideas in the 1995 text.

The 1995 text has a more complex format. Subheadings do not relate to lesson titles in any obvious way; they are more like questions that we might freely generate about the topic, without a hierarchical order. For example, in a lesson entitled "The Skeleton," two sections give parts of the skeleton, and then a third section tells what happens to bones when they are injured. Extra activities and connections are placed between the subtopics in each lesson, rather than lumped together at the end. The format is less repetitive and more varied; the connections among ideas are more complex. In the skeleton section, once the reader understands about the healing process for fractures, he or she can connect that new knowledge back to either section on parts of the skeleton, or to both.

Terri told me that connected and flexible linking is what she always does while she thinks with text. When I asked her about whether she was taking information from things she already knew or things she met in the text, she was very wise. She said, "I think it's kind of all of them...because you put in the stuff you already know. That's like common sense. And you put in what you've already read and what like if you can learn anything by reading before. What you learned before." Students with Terri's well-developed metacognitive sense of the connections between prior knowledge and new content may respond well to the more complex structure.

Looking at sentences and paragraphs. Differences go beyond the overall organization of ideas into the structure of the sentences and paragraphs. The texts are virtually the same length; the 1992 chapter has 19 pages and the 1995 chapter has 21, but the pages are used quite differently. The 1995 text has fewer words of running text: 812 compared to 1,259 in 1992. The newer text also has fewer boldfaced words (2 compared to 9).

There is an important difference between these two texts at the sentence level. There are 16 signal words in the 1992 text to help guide the reader to make connections between sentences. Signal words in the following passage are marked:

At the carnival, Rick had a candy apple. Before riding the Ferris wheel, he ate an ice cream cone. After that, he gulped down a hot dog, french fries, and a soda. The scrambler was next. That was his favorite ride. He went on it five times before he stopped for cotton candy. Soon after, he felt sick and went home early. (Barman et al., 1992, p. 287)

Compare that text to the following selection from the 1995 text, which is actually also about a sequence of events, but totally unsignaled:

Fractures in bones heal over time. The bone cells make new layers of hard bone tissue. This rejoins the broken ends of the bone. If you had a fracture, a cast would probably be put around it to help hold the ends of the bones together while the bones healed. (Brummet, Lind, Barman, DiSpezio, & Ostlund, 1995, p. F19)

This selection was not different from the rest of the text. I counted only 3 signal words in the 1995 chapter.

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I found similarities and differences in recurring sentence patterns. In both texts, the words you and your invite the young reader to draw personal connections; in 1992, secondperson pronouns accounted for 4.1 % of the total running text, and in 1995 that number was 5.3%. For example, the 1992 text involves the reader in understanding dental hygiene. "Brushing your teeth removes food and bacteria from your mouth" (Barman et al., 1992, p. 287). The 1995 text involves her in understanding bone fractures. "When you break a bone, it can heal" (Brummet et al., 1995, p. F18). The number and type of examples of this pattern were essentially the same across the two texts.

On another type of invitation at the sentence level there were differences. The 1995 text has 6 unanswered questions, meant to guide the reader's reflections and connections to experience. Embedded within paragraphs are questions, such as "What would happen to a building if the beams were taken out?" and "What do you think your skull bones protect?" (Brummet et al., 1995, p. F10). The 1992 text used this technique just 3 times.

The newer text also relies on the reader taking responsibility for making meaning by asking the reader to do or think something much more often (11 times compared to 3). Embedded within paragraphs, just like the unanswered questions, are orders such as "Feel your outer ear" (Brummet et al., 1995, p. F13) and "Notice the long bones in the arms and legs of the dancer" (p. F17). The newer text speaks directly with the reader, directing personal connections and cognitive reflections that cause the reader to integrate text ideas with prior knowledge.

Looking at illustrations. A clear and pervasive difference between the two texts is in the illustrations. Direct references to illustrations are similar (3 in 1992 and 4 in 1995), as is the total number of illustrations in the two chapters. But that is not the whole story.

First of all, the illustrations are of different type and quality. In the older text, the most important illustrations are drawings, usually cutaway, employing a limited palate. Photographs illustrate activities suggested in the text. The most important illustrations in the 1995 text are photographs of child dancers, trimmed and placed in contrast to the white page background, with drawings of parts of the skeleton superimposed on them. Alexa liked this, noticing, "It's not like painting pictures, it's real pictures put into the book." The illustrations in the newer text are integrated into the page design in quite creative ways, often drawing attention across the two-page spread. In Figure 4, for example, the dancer's hand on the righthand page extends gracefully toward the dancer on the left-hand page, directing the reader's attention from one page to another.

The illustrations and the captions that go with them play different roles in each text. Bacon (1981) says that illustrations should present information that could not be presented otherwise, and this is the case for both of these science texts; it would be virtually impossible to understand the skeletal or digestive systems with no visual support. In both books, too, almost all of the illustrations are clearly related to the running text. The difference, though, is in the captions, which I interpret broadly to refer to all of the text underneath, beside, and inside the illustrations. In the 1992 text, captions are merely labels or paraphrases of the running text. In 1995, though, the captions are a major source of content, extending the information in the running text, providing connections, and even providing entirely new information.

An example of this contrast in content will help to put it into focus. In the 1992 text, one illustration shows a cutaway of the stomach (p. 282). It is labeled Food Inside the Stomach. Inside the bounds of the illustration is the following information:

1. Food moves from the esophagus to the stomach.

2. Digestive juices are released in the stomach.

3. Stomach muscles squeeze and mix the food and digestive juices.

Running text on this same page is quite similar to this text for the illustration:

Food that enters your stomach stays there for a few hours. During this time, the food is digested more. The stomach makes digestive juices. Stomach muscles then squeeze and mix the food with these juices. Soon, the food changes into a soupy mixture. The same information is presented in two formats. Careful "reading" of the illustration, including both the drawing and the embedded text, or careful reading of just the running text will yield the same information. That would be a comfortable format for Keesha, who told me, "When you're finished reading like this part, you can go back and look at the pictures," expecting that her understanding of the text would be sealed by the redundant information in the illustrations. It would also be in line with research that says that illustrations that repeat and connect with ideas in the text and are annotated with labels and concise captions increase learning (Mayer, Steinhoff, Bower, & Mars, 1995).

Illustrations are different in the 1995 text. On pages F22 and F23, under the heading "How many kinds of joints are there?" the running text says:

The place where two or more bones meet is called a joint. Your body has several kinds of joints. Most joints allow your body to move in a special and different way.

The crux of the information about joints and their movement is presented in numbered captions under drawings of each joint. For example, under a drawing of a shoulder, the caption is as follows:

2. Swing your arm in a circle. Move your leg around at the hip. Your shoulder and hip are ball-and-socket joints and move in a circle.

The information about the type of joint and how it allows movement is only presented once, in this caption. Another interesting aspect of this series of drawings is that ligaments are labeled in three of the five drawings, although only the fifth mentions the function of ligaments in its caption. With that information, the reader is invited (implicitly) to look back to previous drawings and examine the shape and role of ligaments in other joints.

Summary. In summary, then, these two informational texts are the same in some ways (in length, in integrating meaningful text and visual information) and different in other ways (in format; organization; number of signal words; type, color, and layout of illustrations; the role of caption in relation to running text). The differences suggest changes in instruction.

Challenges of choice

New texts like Addison-Wesley's 1995 offering give children more choices. Should they look at pictures before or after reading the captions? Before or after reading the running text? In what order should they navigate the page? When I explored this issue with the fourth graders, the children took advantage of the choices presented in the layout of the page-- there was great variability in their reports of how they would go about reading to prepare for discussion. Some of the children began at the top and proceeded to march through the layout as if it were a traditional textbook. Others took different routes. Bethany started at the end, "the part that looks more interesting," and went backward. Surprisingly, each child omitted something important that the page offered. Some never read the chapter or lesson titles. Some skipped some of the pictures. Some ignored some of the captions. One of the children, Paul, started at the end, and then made good use of the pictures and the captions, but missed the running text. Other investigations of children's use of new science texts in international and multicultural settings (e.g., Peacock, 1997) have found that children do not naturally respond to the illustrations, graphics, and highlighted items in text and have suggested that they need instruction in how to make sense of texts with many features.

The simple fact that newer texts allow children more choices, and they take advantage of those choices, may be a very good thing. Choice may increase interest and attention, lead to more active thinking during reading, and help children to meet new ideas more flexibly and interactively. It may, though, beg some specific instruction as children begin to read informational materials in order to learn new things.

Creating a personal understanding

Comprehension of new informational texts may be much like architectural design. Pearson (1993) calls the reader a "builder," constructing meaning by taking the raw stuff of the printed page, comparing, contrasting, and filling it in with knowledge, and creating a personal understanding. The texts of the two chapters provide certain building materials: text features, paragraphs of running text, and illustrations and captions. Readers can use these materials to provide connections among the ideas, and if they are strategic, they can take advantage of the connections that the author has provided in the construction instructions.

The text model. The work of cognitive scientists who study reading is important in understanding the instructional implications of using texts that promote choice. Kintsch (1994) sees the personal understanding that is constructed in the mind of the reader, the text model, as a two-story structure. The lower story is built from the words the reader has recognized one at a time, linked together in basic grammatical units, and then connected through very simple inferences. For example, when reading the sentences "Bones and muscles are important. They are necessary for movement," the lower level of the text model contains the memory representations of each of the content words, basic grammatical analysis of the noun phrase and the verb phrase, and the inference that "they" refers to bones and muscles.

The second story of the text model requires much more work. At this level, the expert reader elaborates through additional inference, drawing on his or her knowledge, and arranges information hierarchically. In this example, a strong elementary school reader might have drawn additional information from knowledge of bones and muscles into the model. It might consist of some reflections on his/her own bones and muscles, how they have grown larger with age, and specific memories of the pain of a broken arm. In making these inferences and restructuring the material in the text with material already in memory, readers learn with text.

Adding illustrations. Mayer et al. (1995) provide an extension of Kintsch's model to a text environment that includes pictures. In this model, both verbal and graphic information go through the same stages (selection and organization), and then they are integrated. The second story of the text model, then, includes information both from the page and from memory, structured and integrated into a personal understanding.

Developmental implications. This model of constructing meaning may not be ideal for understanding children's comprehension process. Structured, integrated, hierarchically ordered models of information are difficult for children to build, especially when they don't have a very rich base of content knowledge from which to draw. Kintsch (1990) found that even sixth graders could not write well-structured summaries unless the structure of the text was well signaled. For that reason, ideal texts written for children provide clear and rich descriptions of new concepts, provide rather than demand knowledge, and are especially well signaled. Researchers have termed these texts "considerate." Perhaps the need for considerate text decreases as reader knowledge increases. McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, and Kintsch (1996) found that readers with less prior knowledge learned more with very considerate texts, but readers with more prior knowledge could learn even with less considerate text, because (in theory) they made more bridging inferences between the text and what they already knew.

Text revision. In science textbooks that offer children many choices about the order in which they meet information and illustrations, the process is even more complicated. Hegerty, Carpenter, and Just (1991) examined the demands of interpreting diagrams in the comprehension of scientific texts and found that interpreting the illustrations and the text together was more complex than interpreting print alone.

There is other evidence that the structure of the text affects the creation of a personal understanding. Britton, Schneider, Colomb, Sorrells, and Stimson (1996) reviewed studies in which researchers made improvements to textbook selections to increase student learning. They found several patterns in these studies that led to increased learning with texts. Successful text revisions altered the structure of information in the text to make it more explicit; more relationships among ideas were expressly indicated in the new texts. Good text revisions also tended to highlight the main idea explicitly, rather than ask the novice reader to infer it. Britton and his colleagues found these text revisions improve content area learning from reading both in the studies they reviewed and in their own application experiments with text revision. Clearly, the structure and clarity of ideas in text have a role in the personal understanding that children build.

Implications for instruction

These notions guide my suggestions for making the best use of new science textbooks in classrooms. First, the order and structure of ideas in the text affect the understanding that children build. Second, children have a difficult time restructuring new ideas. And third, new science textbooks invite choice about the order in which ideas are met initially and rely on integration of information presented in print and pictures. With those notions in mind, it is more important now than ever before that teachers who teach science also teach the page, and build a bridge between the child and the text. Building that bridge starts with assessment and is then accomplished through cooperative writing, interactive discussions, or guided note taking.

Assessing text knowledge. Not all children or all groups of children need all instruction, so it would be useful for teachers to collect some information on whether the format of the textbook is difficult for their students. One quick way to examine the challenges of text format is to ask the children to write a summary of a small section of their text, perhaps a two-page spread. The goal would be to see which ideas in the text they select to report and the order in which they present them. If children are making sense of the text, perhaps because they are excellent comprehenders of information or because they have a well-structured store of background knowledge about the subject of the text, their summaries (while not the same across children) will be logically structured. If that is the case, no special text structure instruction is necessary.

Another way to assess children's needs, and one that has provided me with a wealth of information about their understanding, is to interview them. Three interview questions will suffice for almost all of the structures and features in textbooks: What is that? Why did the author put it there? How could you use it? Teachers can use these questions to explore knowledge of any combination of things in textbooks: tables of contents, introductions, preview questions, illustrations, diagrams, indexes, summaries, critical thinking questions, review questions. I evaluate children's knowledge about features in textbooks as either strategic (they knew what the thing was and when and how to use it), emergent (they knew what the thing was and had partial knowledge of how to use it), or none (they knew neither what the feature was nor how to use it). Not surprisingly, I have found strong relationships between this knowledge and measures of reading comprehension (Walpole & Dewitz, 1997). Teachers can use this type of interview either to get a measure of the distribution of knowledge in their classroom or to investigate a particular struggling reader's strengths and weaknesses more carefully. Compared to the summary writing task, the interview is a more time consuming but a richer source of data on the knowledge and skills that children bring to the text.

Building understanding through writing. If assessment shows that children need support, Moline (1995) has an excellent suggestion for introducing them to the general format of a new text: introducing it as an example of graphic design, pointing out and naming its features. After students have looked at the features in the model text, their task is to produce another page for the book, on a subject of their choice. Cooperative groups could produce whole chapters. Imitating a text like the one I looked at, students would have to understand the similarities and differences between chapter and lesson titles, the relationships of captions and illustrations, the role of boxed extension activities, and the function and style of the running text.

I worked with Ryan as he produced an imitation of the two-page spread reproduced in Figure 4. Figure 5 is his work.

Ryan considered himself quite an expert on the characteristics of newborn puppies. As he worked to make his imitation, he and I had a rich discussion of the placement of "facts" and what he called "introductions." We also explored the reasoning behind the Side Trip, an extension, at great length. Ryan came away from the writing with a good understanding of the parts of the page in the original text and also a product that made him very proud. Such engagement with the graphic design features of the text, in an authentic writing activity, might encourage children to "read the whole page" with a clearer notion of how to go about that.

Some texts have remarkably useful organizational patterns that children may simply not notice. One group of teachers I know created graphic organizers to illuminate the structure of the text. Basically, they arranged headings and subheadings into a one-page graphic organizer that highlighted their relationships. Children then made notes on these one-page organizers, using the structure to help them to select information and to see how it was related. In kindergarten and first grade, teachers made their organizer on a flip chart, and the class completed it in a group discussion. Starting in second grade, students could complete this activity on their own. Teachers commented that they hadn't realized that the children didn't see the relationships while they read; they assumed that fluent reading led to creation of an integrated, structured understanding.

Building understanding through discussion. Children sometimes need cognitive models of text comprehension. Teachers are powerful cognitive models when they perform physical or mental actions that are suggested in a text. Interactive read-alouds allow for this modeling, which combats what Peacock (1997) calls "the myth of participation," when children breeze over directions and invitations without responding to the call of the text. A teacher, reading aloud a text that asks children to stretch their calf muscles, can provide a powerful model of how to understand if she or he actually rises and stretches, inviting the children to join in. Then they can engage in a conversation about the relationship of that action to the evolving meaning of the text. Likewise, when a text asks a reader to think about how machines help in daily life, the teacher can stop reading and share his or her thinking, inviting the children to join in with suggestions. This modeling can be followed with metacognitive talk about how good comprehenders use their minds (and sometimes their bodies) to build connections while they are reading.

Teachers can also help children to create a mental model of a specific text through interactive discussion. Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, and Kucan's (1997) Questioning the Author technique is excellent. This teacher-led discussion procedure encourages children to build understanding of text through direct teacher queries. Teachers prepare for discussion by examining the text very carefully, noting times when they must draw upon prior knowledge or make inferences across the text. Integration of the illustrations and the running text would be a logical extension of this technique.

An important characteristic of this type of discussion is that it happens during, not after, reading, at the very time when the reader is building a personal understanding. I can imagine very fruitful use of Questioning the Author with a highly formatted science text. Queries such as "What is the author telling us in that illustration?" or "Why does the author use that special typeface there?" could lead students to understandings of the relationship among text features, information that the author has provided, and their own constructive work as comprehenders. Perhaps a guided discussion that highlights these relationships would give students some insights into the design of texts that they could bring to new reading.

Conclusion

Texts are changing, but the goal of supporting children to become confident and independent consumers of information remains. Comprehension instruction that is based on teacher inquiry into student processes can build flexibility with and control over understanding. If we start by considering the structure of ideas and information in a text, then look at the structure of ideas and information that our students bring to that text, we will be much closer to providing the type of instruction that builds bridges between texts and children. Changing texts does change thinking. It should also change instruction.

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