Many primary school students in the Netherlands struggle with reading comprehension, especially when it comes to higher-order comprehension skills, such as summarizing. Scientific literature has suggested various ways to foster text comprehension, for example by providing explicit instruction about text structures (e.g., cause-effect, chronology), as this might foster the construction of a solid mental representation of the text: a coherent situation model (e.g., see Meyer & Ray, 2011). A text structure is the underlying skeleton of a text that organizes all the information. Text structure can be defined as the organization of ideas, the relationship among the ideas and the vocabulary used to convey meaning to the reader” (Pyle et al., 2017:1; see also Armbruster, 2004). What if we would teach children in primary school about text structures? Our meta-analysis showed that explicit instruction about narrative and informative text structures yields positive immediate effects on students' reading comprehension, and that effects vary across outcome measures: recall tasks (g = 0.37), summarization (g = 0.57), reading comprehension tests (g = 0.25), and text structure knowledge tests (g = 0.38) for students in the upper elementary grades. The moderator analysis revealed that content-related features such as a focus on paragraph-level structure, active construction of graphic organizers, and rule-based summarization techniques moderated the effectiveness, but these effects also varied with outcome measure. The mixed-methods study examined the state-of-affairs analysis of the current Dutch primary school reading curriculum for grades 4 and 5. The data are based on a materials analysis of reading comprehension lessons (n = 80) in eight textbooks for grades 4 and 5, supplemented with semi-structured teacher interviews (n = 29) and lesson observations (n = 11). Main findings were (1) a lack of alignment between lesson goals, theory, and assignments, (2) a strong focus on practicing strategies, (3) limited declarative ...