ABSTRACT
Psychologists and educators have recently become interested in story com prehension as a way of obtaining clues as to how people organize meaning in text. Stories have been studied in many forms, including films and picture sequences, as well as oral and written narratives. Drawing on Barlettt’s (1932) original work on memory, researchers in this area have argued that the underly ing organization of narrative stories can be described by a macrostructure, or idealized story “ schema” (Kintsch, 1975; Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979; Thomdyke, 1977; van Dijk, 1972, 1977). The schema represents people’s conceptions of how a typical story is organized from beginning to end. The schema operates as a general framework during the encoding and recall of stories, by allowing information derived di rectly from the input to be combined with a person’s expectations for comprehen sion. It is argued that people rely on the schema to understand stories as they read or listen to them and when they attempt to recall information from the story. They also use the schema to predict what should take place in other stories of similar nature. The question addressed in this research is whether the internal structure of the schema young children use to interpret and recall a story is qualitatively different from the schema adults use.
