Age differences in summarizing descriptive and procedural texts

Abstract

This study compared young and older adults' summaries of expository texts under the hypothesis that older adults would be more experienced, hence more accurate, at summarizing texts. Two types of expository texts were used: procedural and descriptive texts. The texts were read by a panel of judges who wrote summaries of each text and identified the central ideas of each text; the judges' summaries were used to prepare lists of the central ideas of each text and to write standard summaries of each text. The participants read four texts, two orally and two silently, and then wrote summaries, which were limited to 50 words. Words-per-minute reading times were collected and the summaries were scored on two measures of content, how many ideas were reproduced from the original texts and the proportion of central ideas that were reproduced, and two measures of length, the number of sentences and the number of words. Although the older adults read more slowly than the young adults, the older adults reproduced more total and central ideas than the young ideas.