A comparison of Texts and their summaries: Memorial Consequences

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Reder, Lynne M. and Anderson, John R. (1980). pdf A comparison of texts and their summaries: Memorial Consequences, in the Journal of Verbal Learning and verbal Behaviour 19, 121-134. New York.
They did 7 experiments to validate the use of summaries. Interesting findings and methods.
Quotes

• A typical college text contains about 400 pages of text and about 150,000 words. No educator seriously believes that a student will commit all 150,000 words to memory verbatim. What then, do the author and teacher expect the student to remember? P121
• In part the text is intended to communicate a certain set of skills for reasoning or thinking cogently within that field. However, another important function of the text, judging from typical examination questions, is to communicate facts. P121
• The predominant analysis of text has structured the prepositions or idea units hierachically where the more central or important propositions are represented higher in the hierarchy. Investigators of these representations, have found that propositions higher and more central in these hierarchies are better recalled, more accurately recognized and more rapidly verified. P121
• It might be that the reader implicitly recognizes the importance of the central points and assigns greater capacity to their processing. Or it might be that main points, due to their position in the logical structure within a text are better remembered even when amount of processing time is controlled. P121
• For one thing (students read the long, detailed version of a text, rather than a summary) while the writer cannot seriously expect the student to retain all of the text, some of the details will probably be retained and provide illustrations and expansions of the main points. P 122

To summarize, listed below are the arguments for exceeding details when trying to maximize acquisition of important points:

• (1)There are tens of thousands of facts in a text: we cannot expect students to memorize all of these facts ad they don’t
• (2)Students will have to time share, that is devote some of their processing time to unimportant facts.
• (3)It is harder for readers to appreciate of extract the important points if they are embedded in details.
• (4) Hierarchical analyses of text structure assert that details are subordinate in the representation to the main points and therefore cannot help the student remember the main points. Access to details is through the higher level nodes and thus dependent on recovering the main points. P122-123
• Corresponding summary:
• An unfamiliar language sounds like a meaningless torrent of noises.
• A native speaker attends to the meaning not the sound of what he hears.
• The layman, untrained in linguistics, does not understand the true nature of language
• The layman uses language as tool and does not study it analytically
• Language is worth studying because an understanding of language can help in the solution of important human problems. P124
• The summary statements were typed on plain sheets of paper, keeping the section headings of the original text, No paragraph structure or interstitial material was maintained, however. Each sentence started on a new line. P124
• The data from seven experiments have been presented all of which argue that learning material from summaries is at least as good as reading the original text, People’s ability to recognize important facts about a topic after studying it, regardless of the delay between study and test, is superior when the information is learned better (measured by one’s ability to answer questions) if information learned earlier on a related topic was learned by reading a summary. P 132

Ideas

• Ask questions to those who attended the lecture and watched the video summary, and those who just watched the summary and compare the outcomes. P124

Further reading

• Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). Semantic macro-structure and knowledge frame in discourse comprehension. M.A. Just & P.A. Carpenter (Eds)Cgonitive processes in comprehension. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977.

Alberto Ramirez Martinell