Three forms of summarization instruction comprised the treatment and control conditions explored in this study of sixth graders. The two treatment groups received direct instruction in either a rule-governed approach to summarization or an intuitive approach. A control group simply received advice to find main ideas with no explicit modeling. Two dependent measures were used to judge the efficacy of the three instructional approaches to summarization: (a) a paragraph summary writing task and (b) a standardized test of paragraph comprehension. On both measures, treatment groups significantly outperformed the control group. The results are discussed from the perspective of a combined textlinguistic and direct instruction model of learning.
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