Summaries: further issues and data
Neil McLaughlin Cook · Educational Review · 1981
This paper is concerned with how presenting a summary in conjunction with a passage may affect subsequent recall of the passage; it concentrates upon the possibility that previous results might have been influenced by subjects taking little notice of summaries. In the reported experiment, the performance of subjects given a beginning summary on the same page as the main passage was compared with that of subjects given the same summary on a separate page before the passage, the same summary after the passage, or no summary. It was found that subjects in the end summary and beginning summary on a separate page conditions recalled significantly more than subjects in the no summary condition, but the performance of the beginning summary on the same page group did not differ significantly from the no summary group. Future research might usefully investigate how these effects interact with type of summary and type of passage.