210 2. Text structure instruction In the content areas, and therefore also in science education, students have to read expository texts. For many students this is a complex task: in order to construct a coherent mental text presentation, they must be able to decode the words, attribute meaning to the words, and make connections between text parts and with their own background knowledge (Hirsch, 2019; Kintsch, 1998; Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). This requires being able to identify the structure of the text: how the ideas in a text are organized, what the relationships between those ideas are, and which linguistic means are used to make those relationships explicit (Pyle et al., 2017, p. 469). Relations between parts of the text can be visible at the sentence, paragraph, or text level (Graesser et.al., 2004; Ray & Meyer, 2011; Sanders et al., 1992; Sanders & Spooren, 2009). One way that has proven to be effective in helping students grasp informational texts, is to teach them how texts are frequently structured and to teach them to use that knowledge to achieve deep text comprehension (Bogaerds-Hazenberg et al., 2021; Hebert et al., 2016; Pyle et al., 2017). The literature describes several common expository text structures. The most frequently mentioned are Meyer's (1975) five text structures: description, sequence, comparison, cause-effect, and problem-solution. It seems promising to teach knowledge about text structure not as a stand-alone skill but integrated into science education. On the one hand, because such an integrated approach allows for functional reading and writing tasks connected to hands-on research activities. On the other hand, because Meyers’ (1975) five text structures have much in common with the crosscutting concepts (denkwijzen) addressed within the Dutch curriculum framework for science education (Van Graft & Klein Tank, 2018). These include, for example, thinking in cause and effect, thinking in continuity and change (sequence), and thinking in patterns (comparison). Still, Dutch primary education currently pays little attention to teaching knowledge about the structure of texts. Usually this does not go beyond pinpointing the introduction, core and conclusion of a text, and learning to recognize signal words in a text. A previous analysis of teaching programs for reading education, for example, shows that the focus in these programs is mainly on learning to apply reading strategies (procedural knowledge), and that students acquire little declarative and conditional knowledge about text structure. Students learn to recognize signal words in a text, but learn little about what exactly is the function of these signal words and when it is useful to use this knowledge. Teachers also indicate that they find teaching content related to text structure difficult (BogaerdsHazenberg et al., 2017; 2022). Thus, as far as text structure instruction is concerned, there seems to be a research-practice gap in the Netherlands: advice from scientific research does not yet sufficiently find its way into classroom practices. In the research reported on in this dissertation, we therefore investigated whether working on students’ text structure knowledge can support both the understanding of subject concepts (knowledge construction) and the interpretation of texts (text comprehension). A 211
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