BROWN, ANN L; DAY, JEANNE D.; and JONES, ROBERTA S. The Development of Plans for Summarizing Texts. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 968-979. Students from the fifth, seventh, and eleventh grade, together with college students, wrote constrained and unconstrained summaries of stories they had previously learned to criterion. College and older high school students outperformed younger students in their propensity to plan ahead by making rough drafts, in their sensitivity to fine gradations of importance, and in their ability to condense more idea units into the same number of words. The few younger students who planned adequately performed at a level set by college students. Planning, not age per se, was the best predictor of efficiency, although the propensity to plan and age were highly correlated. Under circumstances where summary production is not just the result of automatic retention, the ability to work recursively on information to render it as succinctly as possible requires judgment and effort, knowledge, and strategies, and is, therefore, late developing.
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Brown et al. (1983) studied this question.