Two experiments were conducted with developmental education students to investigate the impact of a contextualized intervention focusing on written summarization and other reading and writing skills.
In Experiment 1 (n = 322), greater gain was found for intervention than comparison participants on three summarization measures: proportion of main ideas from the source text, accuracy, and word count (ES = 0.26–0.42). In Experiment 2 (n = 246), results were replicated for several summarization measures (ES = 0.36–0.70), but it was also found that intervention participants copied more from the source text at posttest than did the comparison group.
Further, intervention participants using science text outperformed students receiving generic text on two summarization measures (ES = 0.32–0.33), providing moderate support for contextualization.
This article was published in the Journal of College Reading and Learning, vol. 43.