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BROWN, ANN L., and SMILEY, SANDRA S. Rating the Importance of Structural Units of Prose Passages. A Problem of Metacognitive Development. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1-8. 20 subjects at each of 4 age levels (8, 10, 12, and 18) rated the linguistic units of prose passages in terms of their importance to the structure and theme of the passages as a whole. There was considerable agreement among independent groups of college students and seventh-grade children concerning these importance ratings, but thirdand fifth-grade subjects were unable to differentiate items in terms of their relative importance to the text. Recall of the text material was determined by the adults' ratings of structural importance. At all ages, the units judged most important dominated recall attempts, while the least important units were rarely recalled. The failure of the younger children to identify the important elements of the text suggests a problem of metacomprehension that could be a contributing factor to their poor study habits.
Brown et al. (Tue,) studied this question.