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Story Structure And Age Effects On Children's Ability To Sequence Stories, E. Mcclure, J. Mason, J. Barnitz

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publications

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth grade students were given scrambled six-sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. The first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began with a sentence which questioned the conclusion of the canonical form; and in the third this conclusion began the story. Significant effects of grade and structure indicated that the canonical form was more easily ordered than were the other structures, and also that third grade students …