Effects of teacher-directed and student-interactive summarization instruction on reading comprehension and written summarization of Korean fourth graders

摘要

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Korean fourth graders??? performance on reading comprehension and written summarization changes as a function of instruction in summarization across test times. Seventy five Korean fourth graders from three classes were randomly assigned to the collaborative summarization, direct instruction, and control groups. During six sessions of 20 min instruction, the experimental students received instruction in summarization via two instructional approaches: collaborative summarization and direct instruction. The collaborative summarization model was developed as an alternative to direct instruction to incorporate scaffolding and active social interaction. Reading comprehension was assessed using three sentence verification tests. Summarization was examined in terms of identifying main ideas and including extraneous information. Writing quality was a combined rating of focus, support, and organization indices. The collaborative summarization group???s performance was significantly improved on identification of main ideas and writing quality in comparison to the control group, but the benefit of collaborative summarization was not reflected in reading comprehension. All three groups tended to produce shorter summaries on posttest and follow-up test than on the pretest, which led to inclusion of significantly fewer extraneous idea units on posttest and follow-up test than on the pretest. The two students at risk for reading difficulties benefited from receiving summarization instruction on reading comprehension, identification of main ideas, and writing quality, but this benefit was not durable. Collaborative summarization needs to be further refined to establish overarching instructional procedures that incorporate scaffolding and peer interaction.