ASSESSING SUMMARY WRITING: QUANTITY, QUALITY OR BOTH?

Recognizing that summarizing skills can contribute to the development of linguistic and transversal competence, we present a revised perspective on summary writing as a complex task, pointing up the highly complex linguistic and cognitive features of summarizing, and discussing the key role that assessment can play throughout teaching-learning processes aimed at developing primary school students’ summarizing abilities. After reviewing qualitative and quantitative tools tested in the assessment research literature, we go on to recommend a new approach to evaluation that combines both structured and open-ended tools. Specifically, we propose a set of guidelines on how to assess primary students’ ability to integrate cognitive, language and content aspects in order to grasp the meaning of the narrative text at both the local and global levels and organize a summary of it.