LE3 .A278 2004

2004

Symons, Sonya

Acadia University

Master of Science

Masters

Psychology

Psychology

The summary writing skills of 58 first-year university students were examined in the context of the writing experiences they reported in high school, their self-regulatory efficacy for writing and the use of computer source documents. Overall, the summaries written by the students were of poor quality. The majority of the sentences they wrote were grammatically incorrect and the students had difficulty determining which information was relevant and necessary for inclusion in their summaries. As well, students included copied text in many of the sentences they wrote. This tendency was not related to whether the text to be summarized was read on a computer or as a printed document. Students reported little feedback about their writing assignments in high school. High school writing experiences were related to students' self-regulatory efficacy for writing. Neither high school writing experiences nor self-regulatory efficacy for writing were correlated with quality of the written summaries. Results are discussed in terms of their implication for high school instruction, university success, and the development of writing curricula.

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