Chapter 2.02.10: Writing Summaries and Syntheses to Learn in Secondary and Higher Education

This chapter investigates how students use reading and writing as tools for learning in Secondary and Higher Education. Some research supports the hypothesis that when reading and writing are used together, in hybrid tasks, they become more powerful learning tools than when employed separately. This chapter analyses the relationships between personal variables (prior knowledge, reading and writing competence) and contextual variables (different types of hybrid tasks, summary and synthesis), on the one hand, and the processes performed by the participants and the products they created, on the other. The best products (summaries and syntheses) were associated with a pattern of procedures in which the students made more recursive and flexible use of reading and writing. The students at the higher levels of the educational system used more complex and appropriate procedures than the students at the lower levels, whose procedures were simpler and more direct. Keywords: higher education; secondary education; writing competence