EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF TRAINING HIGH-SCHOOL-STUDENTS TO USE SUMMARY WHEN TRAINING INCLUDES ANALOGICALLY SIMILAR INFORMATION

The present study investigated the impact of instructing high school s tudents to summarize by comparing students taught to summarize versus those who received no formal instruction. To test whether the amount o f detail in the study material affected the content of summaries, some students were provided with elaborated text and others were given con densed text. Additionally, performance was compared for students who w ere trained using information that was analogous and transferable to s tudy passages versus students who were not exposed to analogous materi als. The effects of these manipulations were assessed through written summaries produced by students, free recall and performance measures. The most important finding was that the students experienced some bene fit from explicit instruction in summarization skills, including great er strategic knowledge about the structure of summaries and modest ach ievement gains.