Summary Writing by Young Children

THE PURPOSE of this study was to examine how fourthand fifth-grade students wrote summaries of both expository and narrative prose and to see where the process was breaking down. In the first investigation, protocol analysis was used individually with 17 children; in the second, 52 subjects were examined in a group setting. Some of the principal findings were that these subjects had no more difficulty summarizing expository than narrative prose, that performance on a standardized reading test did not predict accurately their ability to find and state the main idea in their written summaries, that their written responses were somewhat vague for a general audience to understand, and that no more than 25 % of the subjects could find and explain the moral in the narrative. In fact, inability to find and express the main idea in both rhetorical modes was judged to be the chief deficiency in the students' work. They had a rather superficial understanding of the difference between expository and narrative prose, and exhibited few skills in notetaking or text marking. The article includes a list of eight qualities possessed by the successful summarizers.