Summarization strategies of hearing-impaired and normally hearing college students

The purpose of this study was to compare the summary writing skills of hearing-impaired and normally hearing college students. Summarization was defined in terms of the following measures: deletion of trivial text information, inclusion of most important ideas, selection of topic sentences, creation of topic statements, and integration of information within and among several paragraphs. Inclusion of opinionated, incorrect, and uninterpretable information was measured also. Thirty hearing-impaired and 30 normally hearing students read and summarized two expository science passages that were controlled for the number of topic (main idea) sentences and that had been rated previously for the importance of "idea units." Students' factual comprehension also was assessed. Hearing-impaired and normally hearing students exhibited a similar pattern of use among several measured summarization strategies, except for the inclusion of opinions or comments in their summaries. Hearing-impaired students were not as sensitive as normally hearing students to importance of ideas and used the following summarization strategies significantly less often: inclusion of important ideas, selection of topic sentences, creation of topic statements, and integration of ideas within and among paragraphs. The results indicated that hearing-impaired college students have basic summarization skills but do not apply summarization strategies as effectively as normally hearing students.