| The current study examined the written summarization skills of students attending community college developmental education (remedial) programs. An analysis of the written summaries of a sample of this population was conducted, utilizing an archival data set. The data set consisted of written summaries based on an expository science text. The study had three goals: (1) to determine whether a serial position effect, found in other studies of written summarization, existed in the written summaries of academically underprepared college students, (2) to ascertain whether reading ability, science knowledge, science interest, gender, and the length of a summary were related to any serial position effect found, and (3) to measure the relationship between reading ability, science knowledge, science interest, and gender with the quality of the summaries, as measured by the number of main ideas from the source text, the number of words and sentences written, how accurately information from the source text was relayed in the summary, the extent to which material was copied directly from the text rather than paraphrased in the student's own words, and the use of conventions.A repeated measures analysis of covariance and a multivariate multiple regression were performed to analyze data from 175 community college students. First, a serial position effect was found in the written summaries. Main ideas at the beginning of the source text were more likely to be included in the summaries in comparison to main ideas located elsewhere in the text. Second, the serial position effect was less pronounced in participants with higher vocabulary scores, in students who were female, and in summaries that contained more words. More specifically, participants who tended to have higher vocabulary scores included significantly more main ideas from the end of the source text in comparison to students with lower vocabulary scores. Females were more skilled at including main ideas from the latter parts of the source text in comparison to males. In addition, students who wrote longer summaries were better at including main ideas distributed throughout the source text in comparison to students who wrote shorter summaries.Finally, females wrote higher quality summaries than males. Females included more main ideas in their summaries and were more accurate in their writing, but tended to copy directly from the text. Students with higher interest in science wrote longer summaries compared to students with lower levels of interest in science. Educational implications of the study are that reading strategies are needed for the majority of students in this population to enable them to comprehend and identify the main ideas located throughout a text. |
