Abstract:

Learning the subject of Scientific Research Methods requires students not only to learn the research approaches and their corresponding paradigms, but to develop the oral and written communication competence to present their research proposal. This competence involves the processes of reading and writing. Read to extract from the bibliographic references ideas that are important for writing the research report using the processes of paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting directly. Teachers assume that students know the summary strategy and consequently the procedure for paraphrasing and summarizing. Therefore, when evaluating the research proposal, they observe that the work contains plagiarism because they have not paraphrased or summarized correctly the bibliographic references, which has an impact on the grade of the students. Therefore, teaching these procedures can filter and reinforce the evaluation process. The purpose of this study was to teach the summary strategy to apply it to the processes of paraphrasing and summarizing students who are taking the subject of Scientific Research Methods offered by an Ecuadorian public university. The summary strategy aims to change the structure and words of the original source of information, maintain the same meaning and include only the main ideas. In short, making a summary is a complex cognitive process that requires determining the main idea and the secondary ideas and associating these ideas with the main ideas, omitting the unnecessary details, and organizing the ideas to present them in writing. 84 students participated in this study, of whom 68 are women and 12 are men. The age of the students is between 20 and 22 years old. The instructional unit under study was the "Literature Review", with a duration of 8 hours. The evaluation was carried out in two stages first formatively and then summatively. For this study the Gosset test was applied with a level of significance p < 0.05. The hypothesis examines the difference between the experimental group that was exposed to the summary strategy and the control group that was not exposed to the summary strategy. Gosset’s test indicates that there is a significant relationship (t = 2.47, df = 49.57, p = 0.017). Learning the summary strategy improved performance when executing the paraphrase and summary, which was complemented by practice and respective feedback. The application of the summary strategy in the construction of the paraphrase and summary improved the performance of the students.

Keywords:

Cognitive strategy, Metacognitive strategy, Paraphrasing, scientific research methods.