Text Processing

Abstract

The present study compared the text processing performance of college students who studied a 2,500-word passage and were randomly assigned to one of three study techniques: frequent summarization, infrequent summarization, or personal study methods. Infrequent summarization, but not frequent summarization, was found to lead to significantly better performance than personal study methods on a delayed essay test. The frequent summarizers, however, produced better written summaries during the text processing phase than did the infrequent summarizers. Several interpretations of these results are discussed.