From the onset of schooling, texts are used as important educational tools. In the primary years, they are integral to learning how to decode and develop fluency. In the later elementary years, they are often essential to the acquisition of academic content. Unfortunately, many children experience difficulties with this process, which is due in large part to their unfamiliarity with the genre of academic texts. The articles presented in this dissertation share an underlying theme of how to develop children's ability to comprehend and learn from academic, and specifically, non-narrative texts. The first article reviews research on the development of non-narrative discourse to elucidate the linguistic precursors to non-narrative text comprehension. The second and third articles draw from an empirical study that investigated the best way to integrate text, manipulation, and first-hand experience for children's acquisition and application of an abstract scientific principle. The scientific principle introduced in the study was the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS), a fundamental idea underlying scientific reasoning and a strategy for designing unconfounded experiments. Eight grade 4 classes participated in the study (N = 129), in one of three conditions: (a) read procedural text and manipulate experimental materials, (b) listen to procedural text and manipulate experimental materials, or (c) read procedural text with no opportunity to manipulate experimental materials. Findings from the study indicate that children who had the opportunity to read and manipulate materials were most effective at applying the strategy to designing and justifying unconfounded experiments, and evaluating written and physical experimental designs; however, there was no effect of instructional condition on a written assessment of evaluating familiar and unfamiliar experimental designs one week after the intervention. These results suggest that the acquisition and application of an