Student-Generated Paragraph Summaries and the Information-Processing Theory of Prose Learning
Linda Ferrill Annis · The Journal of Experimental Education · 1985
Student-generated paragraph summaries require students to pause after reading each paragraph of text in order to write a sentence or less summary in their own words. Paragraph summaries appear to meet the demands of the information-processing theory of learning. This study investigated the effectiveness of reading only, regular note taking, and paragraph summaries for questions at the six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Paragraph summaries were most effective at the application and analysis levels and least effective at the synthesis and evaluation levels. These results suggest that paragraph summaries may be most useful in encouraging the essential encoding process.