Macroprocesses and Microprocesses in the Development of Summarization Skill

The present study explored how students' mental representations of an expository text and the inferences they generate vary as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Ninety-six students from Grades 4, 10, and College were asked to write summaries of an expository text and then to answer orally several probe questions about the content. Reading difficulty was systematically manipulated at the microstructure and macrostructure processing levels. The results supported the prediction of qualitative changes in the way the meaning is represented by different age groups in different text conditions.