[Readers' beliefs about text comprehension affect the quality of their summaries of a scientific article]

Readers' beliefs about text comprehension affect how they read texts. A previous study showed two types of readers' beliefs; one is a "transmission belief' which emphasizes the importance of understanding an author's intended meaning, while the other is a "transaction belief' which emphasizes the importance of reader-generated meaning. We expect that these beliefs also affect summarization, where readers need to effectively elicit important information from the text and reconstruct it. The present study examined how readers' beliefs were related to the quality of summaries they made for a scientific article. We used the followings as indicators of the quality of the summaries: how information from a scientific article was elicited and reconstructed, and to what extent the summaries were comprehensible. The results suggest that the stronger the transmission belief of a reader was, the less effectively the reader elicited and reconstructed information and the less comprehensible the summary was. Although it cannot reveal the relationships between the transaction belief and the quality of summaries, the present study suggests that readers' beliefs about text comprehension affect summarization.