Development of reading comprehension from middle childhood to adolescence: Distributional and qualitative analyses of two genres

The study considers the impact of cognitive development and discourse-based factors on the ability to understand different types of written texts from middle childhood across adolescence. Reading comprehension was examined by responses to four types of questions — literal, inferential, integrative, and metatextual — based on narrative and expository texts assigned to monolingual Hebrew speakers at four age-schooling levels (4th, 7th, 11th graders, and adults). Distributional analyses revealed higher scores on comprehension of narrative compared with expository texts in the two younger groups, with comprehension continuing to improve in both genres up to 11th grade and responses of high-school students close to those of the adult participants. Qualitative evaluations of responses to the different types of questions revealed progression from a superficial grasp of basic information to in-depth interpretation of the text as a whole, with more advanced reading comprehension manifested by the ability to combine an integrative approach to text comprehension with attention to specific details and to process information from diverse points of view.