Abstract
The present study investigated the impact of instructing high school students to summarize by comparing students taught to summarize versus those who received no formal instruction. To test whether the amount of detail in the study material affected the content of summaries, some students were provided with elaborated text and others were given condensed text. Additionally, performance was compared for students who were trained using information that was analogous and transferable to study passages versus students who were not exposed to analogous materials. The effects of these manipulations were assessed through written summaries produced by students, free recall and performance measures. The most important finding was that the students experienced some benefit from explicit instruction in summarization skills, including greater strategic knowledge about the structure of summaries and modest achievement gains.