Fifteen students in each of grades 5 and 7 were presented with seven sentences on a computer screen. They were asked to construct a good paragraph and a bad paragraph and then to report what makes a good paragraph good. Products and verbal reports were scored for topical relatedness, superordination, and cohesion, three important structural properties of text. The relation between knowledge reported and knowledge demonstrated was weak for two of the properties. Students were only moderately knowledgeable about topical relatedness and superordination, and unknowledgeable about cohesion.
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