An important aspect of expository text comprehension is structural awareness, readers’ ability to perceive and use the author’s organization to organize their own understandings. This study consisted of two experiments which examined the development of structural awareness through the comparison of 4th, 6th, 7th and 9th grade students’ performance on measures of structural awareness and text comprehension. Experiment 1 investigated the development of structural awareness for the problem-and-solution text structure, and Experiment 2 served as a replication, investigating awareness for the comparison structure. Each experiment tested for a reading skill by grade interaction on measures of text comprehension and structural awareness. Three hypotheses about the relationship between grade and skill were tested: increased difference, stable difference, and no difference. No grade by skill interaction was found. The results from both experiments support a stable difference hypothesis. Structural awareness increases with age; however there maybe periods in which little change occur.
