Premium
Working memory capacity and summarizing skills in ninth‐graders
Author(s) -
LEHTO JUHANI
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1996.tb00641.x
Subject(s) - working memory , psychology , comprehension , ninth , sentence , cognitive psychology , selection (genetic algorithm) , short term memory , subject (documents) , linguistics , developmental psychology , natural language processing , cognition , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , neuroscience , acoustics , library science
The relationship between students' working‐memory (WM) capacity and their ability to include main points ( macropropositions ) in their summaries was investigated. Sixty Finnish ninth‐grade students summarized a modified expository passage by E. Kintsch (1990). When writing the first, unconstrained, summary the students had access to the text and when they wrote the second, constrained, summary with 30 words at maximum, they had access to the first summary. Working‐memory capacity was measured using Turner and Engle's (1989) sentence‐word and operation‐work span tasks which tax both storage and processing functions of working memory. The results indicated that WM capacity is an important factor in the processing of lower‐level macropropositions. This finding is in agreement with a number of earlier studies which have investigated the relationship between WM capacity and different aspects of text comprehension. The results could not, however, conclusively describe the role of WM in selection of the highest‐level information (topics and subtopics) in a subject's summary.