Effects of strategy instruction and self-monitoring on summary writing of college students.
Item
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Title
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Effects of strategy instruction and self-monitoring on summary writing of college students.
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Identifier
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AAI9431354
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identifier
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9431354
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Creator
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Friend, Rosalie.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Shirley Feldman
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Education, Reading | Education, Educational Psychology | Language, Linguistics | Education, Higher
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Abstract
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This classroom study drew on the text processing theory of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) to teach college students strategies for summarization for use in studying. Generalization, a process for judging importance and condensing text, was contrasted with argument repetition, a feature of the surface structure of text which establishes coherence and thus indicates importance. Each strategy was taught with and without self monitoring. A control group wrote about the same materials and took the posttest.;The dependent measure was a summary of a passage from Day's (1980) study of summarization. The generalization group significantly outperformed the argument repetition group and control group on constructing a thesis statement which clearly requires macroprocessing. Overall summarization was significantly better in instruction groups than in the control group; the generalization group scored higher than the argument repetition group, but the difference was not significant. Instruction groups did significantly better than controls at excluding ideas that were unimportant, redundant or extraneous and at stating information directly (avoiding empty references). Inclusion of important ideas was higher among instruction groups, but not statistically significant. Sentence transformation, integration of ideas at the sentence level, was not improved by instruction. Self monitoring as implemented in this study did not make a significant difference in summarization.;Students in college developmental reading and writing classes often have trouble going beyond the surface structure of text. Many are bewildered by instructions to put only "important" ideas in summaries. Instructions to use generalization or argument repetition were easily understood, and students commented on the usefulness of the strategies.;In future research these strategies should be taught for a longer period with a wider range of materials, a pretest, and a test of maintenance and transfer. Poor reliability of scores from one passage to another remains a problem for summarization research; having subjects write two posttest summaries might be wise. A measure of self efficacy and of students' understanding of summarization processes would improve future research.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
