Macroprocesses and Microprocesses in the Development of Summarization Skill

Abstract

This study explored how students' mental representations of an expository text and the inferences they generated varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Ninety-six students from Grades 6 and 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 support the prediction of qualitative changes in the way the meaning is represented by different age groups in different text conditions. These are related to the amount and kinds of inferential processes on which the summaries were based. Interestingly, college students generalized the content more in summarizing texts with poor macrostructure than in summarizing texts with good macrostructure. That more macropropositional statements occurred in responding to the probe questions than in the summaries could be explained in terms of the different retrieval conditions that prevailed. Some educational implications of these findings are discussed.