Developing Summarizing Skills in 4th Grade Students: Intervention Programme Effects

Abstract

The aim of our 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.

Keywords

• Summarizing
• younger students
• intervention
• reading competency
• metacognitive knowledge