WORKING-MEMORY CAPACITY AND SUMMARIZING SKILLS IN 9TH-GRADERS

The relationship between students' working-memory (WM) capacity and th eir ability to include main points (macropropositions) in their summar ies was investigated. Sixty Finnish ninth-grade students summarized a modified expository passage by E. Kintsch (1990). When writing the fir st, unconstrained, summary the students had access to the text and whe n they wrote the second, constrained, summary with 30 words at maximum , they had access to the first summary. Working-memory capacity was me asured using Turner and Engle's (1989) sentence-word and operation-wor k span tasks which tax both storage and processing functions of workin g memory. The results indicated that WM capacity is an important facto r in the processing of lower-level macropropositions. This finding is in agreement with a number of earlier studies which have investigated the relationship between WM capacity and different aspects of text com prehension. The results could not, however, conclusively describe the role of WM in selection of the highest-level information (topics and s ubtopics) in a subject's summary.