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Enhancing Student Performance through Discipline-Based Summarization…
Enhancing Student Performance through Discipline-Based Summarization-Stragery Instruction
This complex process requires the comprehension of written content subsequent condensation and transformation of important information at the expense of minor details.
English for academic purposes courses often take one of two forms
Skills-Based language courses
Both promote the development of one or more language skills.
Content-Based courses
Summary-Writing: Underlying Cognitive Process
Rumelhart
Summarizing text is much like trimming a tree: content at the lower level of importance in the structure of the text is dicarded.
Kintsch and van Dijk
Their model of text summarization relies on the mental operations required to produce the gist of text.
Methodology
Program participants
The students were enrolled in adjunct study group courses designed to enhance the academic literacy skills in English.
Program Design and Rationale
Summarization instruction, as implemented in this study, relied on three complementary features.
Discipline-Based Instruction
The summarization instruction was discipline-based in that it was driven by the demands of the general education courses in which students were enrolled.
Training with Awareness
Involved teaching students what each summarization strategy was, why the strategy had to be learned, how and when to use the strategy and how to evaluate the use of the strategy
Assisted Perfomance
The third critical feature of the summarization-strategy training consisted of providing students with scaffolding or assisted performance.
Data Collection
In the winter quarter, the Health Science and animal Biology study group students completed a timed, in-class pre- and post-intervention summarization task on discipline-specific articles containing features characteristic of descriptive and comparative texts.
Before completing the pre-intervention summarization task, the students were asked to write for five minutes on the topic about which they would be reading, these students obtained a score of 0 which indicated that they knew nothing about the topic.
Data analysis
The summary protocols were analyzed in the following ways.
• Second: summarization efficiency was calculated by dividing the total number of main ideas present in the summaries by the total number of words included.
• Third: in order to analyze the students’ strategies in combining and reproducing main ideas from the source texts, the following steps were taken.
• First: Following the protocols adapted from the TOEFL test of Written English. Each summary protocol was assigned a composite score, consisting of the sum of the three independent scores. The scores obtained ranged from a low of 3 to a high of 18.
Instructional outcomes
This section presents the outcomes arising from the discipline-based summarization-strategy instruction program. It focuses on the students’ holistic performance, on the strategies they employed to reproduce and combine information from the source text, and on the rhetorical features revealed in the summaries.
Holistic and main idea performance
One of the benefits of instruction was a significant gain in the students’’ holistic performance. In addition, the students improved in their ability to identify a significantly higher number of main ideas as well as in their ability to write more efficient summaries—that is, summaries that focused more on central ideas and that excluded irrelevant and redundant information. Has shown that “able” and “less able” readers differ in their sensitivity to the importance of textual ideas.
Reproduction and combination strategies
Additional benefits of instruction included an increase in the use of appropriate reproduction strategies. The results of the post-intervention task show that the students found synonyms for content words and phrases, a shill that appears late and requires not only the understanding of written text but also the command of a large vocabulary.
Rhetorical features
The tendency to include personal reactions in the summary may be attributed to the students’ lack of acculturation to university culture. This explanation is based in the observation that lack of objectivity was noticed among project students who had no more than two quarters of college experience and not among the Latino students enrolled in sophomore and junior courses.