Towards App-based Formative Feedback to Support Summarizing Skills

Secondary education students have difficulty to comprehend text, let alone, hypertext. Summarizing is an effective strategy to improve text comprehension. It enables students to link the text content to existing prior knowledge, promotes self-testing which helps them to identify their comprehension gaps and fix them and directs students' attention to important content parts. However, summarizing takes skill that secondary education students often lack. This paper discusses the design of an app which aims to enhance summarizing skill acquisition and, hence, text comprehension of secondary education students by providing just-in-time, formative feedback as part of summarization activities. The app discussed will offer a formative assessment of a student’s summary through visualization of salient aspects of it as compared to a peer’s or teacher’s work with additional guidance. Visualisation and guidance will be highly automated thus easing access and use in real practice. It builds on prior, recent research, showing that automatically created visualisations can be used to support writing.