Armbruster found that recalling stories from memory is superior when the structure of the story is clear. She also noted the close relationship between global content and organization. Content is an aspect of structure, and organization is the supreme source of comprehension difficulty.

For local coherence, Armbruster stressed the highlighting that carries meanings from one phrase, clause, or sentence to another:

• Pronoun references to previous nouns
• Substitutions or replacements for a previously used phrase or clause (sometimes called "resumptive modifiers"), for example: "These results [previously listed] suggest that..."
• Conjunctions
• Connectives

Finally, Armbruster supported Kintsch's finding that coherence and structure are more important for younger readers than older ones, simply because they have less language and experience.

Calfee, Curley, and the familiar outline R.C. Calfee and R. Curley (1984) built on the work of Bonnie Meyer. They stressed making the structure of the text clear to upper-grade readers. The content can be simple, but an unfamiliar underlying structure can make the text unnecessarily difficult.

They proposed that the teacher, researcher, and student all need to reach a mutual understanding of the type of outline being used for the text under discussion.

Most students are familiar with the narrative structure, but not with other forms. Calfee and Curley present a graduated curriculum that enables students to progress from simpler structures to ones that are more difficult:

1. Narrative - fictional and factual
2. Concrete process - descriptive and prescriptive
3. Description - fictional, factual particular, and factual general
4. Concrete topical exposition
5. Line of reasoning - rational, narrative, physical and relational cause-and-effect
6. Argument - dialogue, theories and support, reflective essay
7. Abstract exposition

The lessons of content, organization, and coherence Organization and coherence highlight the relationships between words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger sections of text. They enable readers to fit new items of information into their own cognitive systems of organization.

The cognitive studies of readability also showed other problems that texts can reveal or create, such as:

• Unfamiliar life experiences and background
• The need for time to digest illustrations and new material
• The need for multiple treatments of difficult material
• The need for learning aids to overcome textual difficulty
• The need for learning aids to help readers of different levels of skill.

Generally, however, the cognitive researchers failed to translate their theories into practical and objective methods for adjusting the difficulty of texts for different levels of reading skill.