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Nice artice that brings insight on how to work through levels of cognition for students. So many of them cannot summarize, because, for the most part, teachers may not be using the best techniques to elicit good responses.

While it may be true that teachers may not use the best techniques, summarizing is a difficult skill to teach in and of itself.Most students will equate summarizing with " giving a book report" and misconstrue what summarizing truly entails. Having students sift through details and information to arrive at "the important details" is a continuous cognitive process that children reach at different levels at different times in their cognitive development which is one reason why I think this skill is so difficult to teach.

Previous research has shown that disfluency - the subjective experience of difficulty asso- ciated with cognitive operations - leads to deeper processing. Two studies explore the extent to which this deeper processing engendered by disfluency interventions can lead to improved memory performance. Study 1 found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting. Study 2 extended this finding to high school classrooms. The results suggest that superficial changes to learning materials could yield significant improvements in educational outcomes.

Interesting article which has implications for instructional design.