Learning to Summarize: Examining the Effects of a Summarization Instruction on Summarizing Skills and Reading Comprehension

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Developing Early Adolescents’ Identity, Self-Concept, and Skill as Writers

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop a summarization instruction that integrated summarizing rules and text structure awareness and to examine its effects on fifth graders’ summarizing skills and reading comprehension. Six fifth-grade classes from three elementary schools in Taiwan served as participants. One class in each school was assigned to the experimental group, which received the summarization instruction for a whole school year, and the other class to the control group, which was taught by traditional method. Before, at the end of, and three weeks after the experiment, the students wrote two summaries and their reading comprehension were tested. The effects of the instruction on summary efficiency and reading comprehension are examined by sets of one-way ANCOVAs.

Author

• I-Chung Lu, National Pingtung University of Education