Direct Instruction of Summarization Skills

BORROWING FROM the work of Brown and Day (1983; Day, 1980), two versions of a summarization intervention program were designed, one taught inductively and one taught deductively. The inductive instruction and the deductive instruction were delivered to 22 low-income, minority high school students each, over three 2-hour sessions, excluding pretest and posttest. No significant differences in summarization process and product were observed between the two instructed groups, following instruction. However, the two groups were significantly different from a control group in terms of summarization efficiency and summarization rule usage, and these differences were maintained 2 weeks after instruction had ended. Results were generalizable to near transfer summarization activities, but not to a far transfer outlining activity. Students also failed to improve in their ability to identify implicit topic sentences. Discussion is devoted to explicating these findings.