Students’ Approaches to Summarisation

Abstract

This paper considers the role that students’ approaches to learning play in summarising text, and in learning from summarisation. Students’ approaches to learning are characterised in terms of their relative reliance upon deep and surface processing. Two forms of summarisation are studied: the familiar text present summarisation, in which students have access to the text while summarising, and the less familiar text absent summarisation, in which students are warned that the text will be removed after they read it, but before they summarise it. It is predicted that text absent summarisation will facilitate deeper processing for students who normally adopt a deep approach and who are able to write competent summaries, and that these effects will be more apparent for the more difficult text. The results confirm the hypotheses and indicate that the two types of summarisation encourage different processes. Discussion focuses upon the relative merits of the approaches to learning and of the two forms of summarisation. It is concluded that the effects of students’ approaches to learning play a powerful role in summarisation, and need to be studied with respect to other learning activities.