An Analysis on Student-Written Summaries: A Step towards Developing an Automated Summarization Assessment

Abstract

Summarization is an important skill which involves multiple cognitive activities that occur during abridging a text such as identifying relevant content, understanding the text and generating a short version of it or collectively known as summarizing. Since the skill is one of the best learning strategies to evaluate student’s comprehension for a given text, it has been introduced to English syllabus in secondary schools in Malaysia. This paper presents the results of an analysis on the student-written summaries as a preliminary step towards developing an automated summarization assessment system. The main purpose of this investigation is to determine the abilities of school students in summary writing which focused on two aspects: 1) the performance of the students and 2) the summarizing strategies used by the students. Document analysis method and sentence extraction method are used to analyze the student-written summaries that were collected from a secondary school. Results from this study indicated that the students are very weak at summary writing which also reflects their failures to use the summarizing strategies effectively. In order to improve the situation, a computer-based summarization assessment system is proposed to detect the strategies used by students in summarizing and assess the important ideas presented in their summaries.