Effectiveness of Instruction for Summarising Handouts and Academic Writings

Abstract

Academic writing skills are expected to acquire logical thinking and to lead to effective learning. The summarised handout is an academic writing activi-ty. To promote the creation of suitable handouts for learners, a guideline of the preparation procedure was developed in a previous study. In this study. The validity of the procedure is evaluated experimentally. First, the factors useful for assessing handouts were confirmed through a handout generation and evaluation experiment. When the guideline instructions were given be-fore handout creation session, factor scores increased in comparison to the condition when instruction was not given. The effectiveness of instruction was investigated by assessing the handouts generated using the guideline items. In the results, two factors were extracted: "Format" and "Content". The instructions promoted the contribution of the "Content" factor regard-ing the degree of usefulness of the handout. The contributions of handout content instructions were then evaluated lexically using morphological analysis. The instructions encouraged taking concise notes from handouts, and the total number of morphemes and nouns subjects wrote down de-creased, though the number of adjectives increased slightly. Accordingly, the effectiveness of instructions for generating handouts was evaluated.