Summary Protocols of “Underprepared” and “Adept” University Students: Replications and Distortions of the Original

The summary task requires the use of higher order reading skills; identification of main ideas and condensation of text while maintaining the focus of the original. Though there have been a number of studies examining the summarizing skills of elementary and secondary students (e.g. Brown et al. 1981; Day 1980; Winograd 1984), skills of university students have not been well documented. Nor has a complete scale for scoring protocols been produced. It was the purpose of this study to examine the summarizing skills of “underprepared” or remedial university students and to develop from their protocols a scale for coding replications and distortions of the original. Findings indicate that underprepared students omit a number of main ideas from their summary protocols and include more sentence‐level reproductions than combinations of idea units (IUs) or macropropositions. However, the data indicate that the underprepared students do not differ significantly from other student groups in their balance and distribution of IUs in their protocols, nor do they employ more distortions (i.e. IUs which are not true to the original).