Researchers Brown and Day examined the developmental sequence of six strategies students use to summarize text (my emphasis):
Two of the six rules involve deletion of unnecessary material. One should obviously delete material that is trivial, and even grade school children are quite adept at this if the form and content of the material is familiar (Brown, Day, & Jones, in press; Johnson, 1978). One should also delete material that, although it is important, is also redundant. Kintsch and van Dijk’s system also includes these two deletion rules. Two of the rules of summarization involve the substitution of a superordinate term or event for a list of items or actions. For example, if a text contains a list such as: cats, dogs, goldfish, gerbils, and parrots, one can substitute the term pets. This is Kintsch and van Dijk’s generalization rule. Similarly, one can substitute a superordinate action for a list of subcomponents of that action, i.e., John went to London, for: John left the house, John went to the train station, John bought a ticket, etc., etc. This is roughly comparable to Kintsch and van Dijk’s (1978) integration rule. The two remaining rules have to do with providing a summary of main constituent unit of text, the paragraph. The first rule is – select a topic sentence, if any, for this is the author’s summary of the paragraph. The final rule is – if there is no topic sentence, invent your own.
Brown, A.L., & Day, J.D. (1983). Macrorules for Summarizing Texts: The Development of Expertise. Center for the Study of Reading, Illinois University
What they found may help teachers identify the developmental stage a student is at:
“…a clear developmental pattern was found, with deletion rules emerging first followed by superordination [substitution] and then selection. Invention, the most difficult rule, was late developing. We believe that the five rules differ in their ease of application because they demand different degrees of text manipulation on the part of the learner, and perhaps because they depart to a greater or lesser extent from the already existing strategy favored by the younger participants. This has been called the copy-delete strategy (Brown, 1981; Brown, Day, & Jones, in press) because fifth and seventh grade and junior college students summarize texts primarily by deleting, or copying near verbatim the words actually present in the text
Brown, A.L., & Day, J.D. (1983). Macrorules for Summarizing Texts: The Development of Expertise. Center for the Study of Reading, Illinois University
Intriguingly, they suggest that an earlier, over-simple strategy may need to be actively unlearned in order to progress to the later strategies:
““…there is evidence that partially adequate strategies such as copy-delete are not just way-stations on the road to expert strategies; they may actually impede progress...We would like to argue that partially adequate strategies such as copy-delete and knowledge-telling are maintained by inexperienced writers because they do result in intermittent reinforcement and are recognizable attempts to get the job done. The process of development is not just one of acquiring increasingly more refined and sophisticated strategies; development involves the systematic consolidation of mature strategies, combined with the rejection of plausible but less efficient habits
Brown, A.L., & Day, J.D. (1983). Macrorules for Summarizing Texts: The Development of Expertise. Center for the Study of Reading, Illinois University
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