Abstract
The aim of study was to determine whether summarizing skills could be developed in 4th grade primary school students. We designed a 5-month intervention programme as an experimental study, in which teachers trained students in the experimental group in their ability to summarize, which is one of the important strategies that enhance reading comprehension. 190 students in 4th grade from 8 primary schools in Slovenia participated in the study. We evaluated students’ general reading competency, their metacognitive knowledge about reading and their ability to make summaries of two short and one longer expository text (pretest, posttest and follow-up test). The general reading competency explained the most variance in summarizing at pretest and posttest by experimental and control group of students. In the follow-up test, the summarizing from posttest was the strongest predictor in both groups and in the experimental group also the metacognitive knowledge about reading. The results showed that teachers can develop summarizing skills in students by systematically training them to use these skills, but the training effects decrease if the learning environment does not encourage students to use these skills.
Highlights
Learning to read is an important activity in the lower grades of elementary school as it forms the basis for further learning and academic achievement of an individual (Pečjak, Kolić-Vehovec, Rončević Zubković, & Ajdišek 2009)
We first determined whether EG and CG were comparable in terms of GRC, MKR and summarizing ability before the intervention (Table 1)
We investigated the effects of an intervention programme for 4th grade primary school students
Summary
Learning to read is an important activity in the lower grades of elementary school as it forms the basis for further learning and academic achievement of an individual (Pečjak, Kolić-Vehovec, Rončević Zubković, & Ajdišek 2009). In the 4th grade, students enter a period of reading to learn (Gillet et al, 2003), in which students are expected to learn how to use reading for independent learning from textbooks. Students in the 4th grade are confronted with longer and more demanding texts and they are expected to read them independently, find the main ideas in them and combine these ideas into a meaningful summary. Since learning from longer texts causes great difficulties for many students, these (too) high expectations are known as “hitting the wall of the 4th grade” (Meltzer, 2007), summarizing is one of the key strategies for good reading comprehension in this period. Summarizing is a learning strategy, by which students find important information in a text and combine them into a short, coherent text – summary. To be able to do this, students have to analyse each of the sentences/paragraphs, search for important words in each paragraph, leave out the unimportant or specific information and gather the important information in to a whole that makes sense (Westby, Culatta, Lawrence, & Hall-Kenyon, 2010)
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