Writing a Summary of an Article About a Research Report

Havo 5 Schrijfvaardigheid

Writing a summary of an article about a research report.

De volgende bladzijden zullen je voorbereiden op het maken van een samenvatting van een artikel over de resultaten van een onderzoek.

Writing a report summary of an article about a research report.

• One of the tasks in your writing exam will be to write a summary of a text. This will always be an article based on a research report.
• General hints on summary writing can be found in your Reference, page 50 ( 7.9)

In this booklet you are going to do tasks to prepare you for this skill.

What is a report?

This is a written text on a subject conveying information and ideas. Everything is expressed clearly and it is well-structured.

What is a research report ?

Scientists introduce the interested reader to an investigation that was carried out by someone or a team.

It tells you how this research was conducted.

It analyses and interprets data.

It reaches a conclusion ( and sometimes makes recommendations).

It is very formal.

What is an article about a research report?

This tells the general public about a research report.

It tries to grip your attention in the first paragraph.

It is less well-structured, but still contains ( somewhere…) the points mentioned above: An introduction, the method they used, the results they obtained, their conclusion(s and recommendations).

It will also sometimes add recommendations of its own and comments on the research.

The style can be much less formal.

Your task will be to summarise an article in a (more) formal style, reducing it to :

• The introduction
• The method
• The results
• The conclusion (and recommendations).

Perhaps the article will contain more (a discussion /comments) This part is MUST be left out.

How?

As your summary should be nice and short, you must leave out all unnecessary details. It must still be informative enough for the reader: so don’t leave too much out either.

Don’t forget to give the summary a title: this too must be quite formal and factual. The one in the original article will often be a pun, i.e. a play on words.

In this file you are going to do this task for “The name Game” step by step.

• look for the method and the results first
• the conclusion is often (also) given at the beginning of the article: move it to the end and use the beginning to write your own introduction
• don’t forget to give your summary a title.

Task 1

Find the following in the text below. Use different colours or underline differently. You can also circle the appropriate parts.

Look back at the Tips on the previous page: where do you start?!

• The introduction

• The method

• The results

• The conclusion ( and recommendations).

• (The comments made by the writer of the article – if any.These are not part of the report)

The Name Game

What’s in a name? The secret to your success new research suggests.

A recent study published in the Journal of Social Psychology found that people tend to predict career success on how well a person’s name matches the gender associated with their vocation. Ohio University (OU) researchers asked participants to read descriptions of people – including their name and occupation – and found that they deemed women with a more feminine name like Emma or Clarissa more likely to be successful in traditional female occupations such as nursing and primary school teaching, while men with a more masculine name like Hank or Dave were expected to excel at jobs like plumbing or carpentry – traditionally considered a male career.

The results suggest that people with names that don’t “ fit “ their desired career might have more difficulty finding work than equally qualified colleagues with more fitting names. This surprised James Bruning, Ph.D., and OU psychology professor and the study’s lead author. ‘We thought that with today’s political correctness, everybody would be assumed to be able to do everything equally well – but we just didn’t find that.” He suggests that parents ‘be aware of the name they give because it probably does reflect their expectations for the child. ‘

- Cindy Klinger in Psychology Today, December 2000

Task 2

Now you have the parts, bar out (doorstrepen) all the unnecessary words or phrases of the text such as…

The Name Game

What’s in a name? The secret to your success new research suggests.

A recent study published in the Journal of Social Psychology found that people tend to predict career success on how well a person’s name matches the gender associated with their vocation. Ohio University (OU) researchers asked participants to read descriptions of people – including their name and occupation – and found that they deemed women with a more feminine name like Emma or Clarissa more likely to be successful in traditional female occupations such as nursing and primary school teaching, while men with a more masculine name like Hank or Dave were expected to excel at jobs like plumbing or carpentry – traditionally considered a male career.

The results suggest that people with names that don’t “ fit “ their desired career might have more difficulty finding work than equally qualified colleagues with more fitting names. This surprised James Bruning, Ph.D., and OU psychology professor and the study’s lead author. ‘We thought that with today’s political correctness, everybody would be assumed to be able to do everything equally well – but we just didn’t find that.” He suggests that parents ‘be aware of the name they give because it probably does reflect their expectations for the child. ‘

- Cindy Klinger in Psychology Today, December 2000

Remember not to include the comments and recommendations in your summary, so, you stop after the conclusion.

Task 3

Now rephrase the parts you kept: use other words to say the same thing.

Of course you can keep some words the same, but you must make the text your own and not just use the words from the article.

Don’t forget to give the summary a title: this too must be quite formal and factual.

Do not forget the TIPS!!! They are at the bottom of this page too!!!!!

TITLE

INTRODUCTION

METHOD

RESULTS

CONCLUSION

optional: COMMENTS / SUGGESTIONS / RECOMMENDATIONS

Tips

• look for the method and the results first
• the conclusion is often (also) given at the beginning of the article: move it to the end and use the beginning to write your own introduction
• don’t forget to give your summary a title.

Hieronder zie je het beoordelingsschema voor de samenvatting:

Task 4: SUMMARY WRITING 1:

Maak een samenvatting van Elephants' jumbo mirror ability

1. Doe dat in de afgesproken structuur ( I M R C).
2. Laat een regel wit tussen je alinea’s.
3. Bedenk een titel

Woordenlijst

Assessin te schatten

self-recognitionof ze zichzelf herkennen

self-other distinctionof ze kunnen onderscheiden tussen zichzelf en een ander

altruisticzorg ( voor anderen)

species soort

canineshonden / hondachtigen

for consumptionom te eten

ensureom er zich van te vergewissen, om zeker te weten dat

cognitive elitede elite van dieren met een groter verstand/kennis

commensuratepassend bij

convergentsamenlopende

Beoordelingsschema

Elephant mirror tests

Elephants can recognise their own reflection scientists say. US researchers made the discovery by studying the behaviour of Asian elephants in front of a tall mirror. One of the animals repeatedly touched a white cross painted on her forehead - a classic test used to assess mirror self-recognition in children and apes. The study is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We see highly complex behaviours such as self awareness and self-other distinction in intelligent animals with well-established social systems," said Joshua Plotnik, from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. "The social complexity of the elephant, its well-known altruistic behaviour and, of course, its huge brain, made the elephant a logical candidate species for testing in front of a mirror."

'X' marks the spot

Many animals will respond to a mirror but very few show any evidence that they recognise themselves in the reflection. Canines, for example, will react to the "other dog" and will even look behind the mirror to try to find it. The Asian elephants in this study also displayed this type of behaviour when standing in front of a 2.5m-by-2.5m mirror - they inspected the rear and brought food close to the mirror for consumption. But one of the elephants, called "Happy", went to the next level: she began repeatedly touching a painted "X" on her head with her trunk. The mark could only be seen in the mirror, and the elephant ignored another mark made with colourless paint that was also on her forehead to ensure she was not merely reacting to a smell or feeling. While only one elephant passed the mark-touching test, the researchers note that fewer than half of chimpanzees tested typically pass this test.

A clever club

"Elephants have been tested in front of mirrors before but previous studies used relatively small mirrors kept out of the elephants' reach," said Plotnik. "This study is the first to test the animals in front of a huge mirror they could touch, rub against and try to look behind." Co-researcher Frans de Waal said: "As a result of this study, the elephant now joins a cognitive elite among animals commensurate with its well-known complex social life and high level of intelligence. "Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities, making complex social systems and intelligence part of this picture. "These parallels between humans and elephants suggest a convergent cognitive evolution possibly related to complex sociality and cooperation." The study, conducted with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), used elephants housed at the Bronx Zoo in New York.

Task 5: SUMMARY WRITING 2:

Maak een samenvatting van Gaze ‘key to facial attraction’.

• Doe dat in de afgesproken structuur ( I M R C).
• Laat een regel wit tussen je alinea’s.
• Bedenk een titel

Woordenlijst

Beoordelingsschema

Gaze 'key to facial attraction'

You can alter your attraction to the opposite sex simply by looking straight at them and smiling, research suggests. A study of hundreds of volunteers at Stirling and Aberdeen Universities found averting the eyes even a fraction can make you appear less attractive. In the Royal Society's Proceedings B journal, they say the direction of gaze plays a role alongside a symmetrical face or healthy skin.

The study used pictures of male and female faces which had been subtly digitally manipulated. In one picture, a woman might be looking straight at the camera, while in the next, a tiny adjustment meant she would be looking marginally to the left or right. The difference was so small that it was not immediately obvious to the viewer.

However, after these pictures were shown to 460 men and women, who were asked to rate them for "attractiveness", it became clear that it was having a pronounced subliminal effect. In some pictures, there was an eight-fold difference in ratings between the "straight to camera" and averted gazes. While many studies have found links between face shape, expression and other physical "cues" to attraction, this is one of the first to look in more detail at the direction of gaze. The researchers wrote: "Mating effort is a finite resource that should be allocated judiciously, and preferences for direct gaze in opposite-sex faces would increase the likelihood of allocating mating effort to potential mates who are most likely to reciprocate."

One of the paper's authors, Dr Claire Conway, said: "People prefer faces that appear to 'like' them, showing that attraction is not simply about physical beauty." Professor Ruth Mace, a researcher into evolutionary anthropology at University College London, said that while this seemed an obvious principle, it could be a sign of evolution at work. She said: "It's a pretty clear signal whether a person is interested in you or whether you are wasting your time. "But it suggests that how attractive you find someone is governed partly by how likely you are to be successful."

Task 6: SUMMARY WRITING 3

Maak een samenvatting van Learning Best When You Rest

1. Doe dat in de afgesproken structuur ( I M R C).
2. Laat een regel wit tussen je alinea’s.
3. Bedenk een titel

Woordenlijst

recallherinnering

habituallygewoonlijk

assignedkregen de opdracht

declarativedit woord wordt verder in de alinea uitgelegd!

semantical(ly) semantisch = wat betekenis/feiten betreft

episodicvoor gebeurtenissen

overallover het algemeen

wakefulnesswakker zijn

novelnieuw

Learning Best When You Rest

Mar. 23, 2012 — Nodding off in class may not be such a bad idea after all. New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is most beneficial for recall.

Notre Dame psychologist Jessica Payne and colleagues studied 207 students who habitually slept for at least six hours per night. Participants were randomly assigned to study declarative, semantically related or unrelated word pairs at 9 a.m. or 9 p.m., and returned for testing 30 minutes, 12 hours or 24 hours later. Declarative memory refers to the ability to consciously remember facts and events, and can be broken down into episodic memory (memory for events) and semantic memory (memory for facts about the world). People routinely use both types of memory every day -- recalling where we parked today or learning how a colleague prefers to be addressed.

At the 12-hour retest, memory overall was superior following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness. However, this performance difference was a result of a pronounced deterioration in memory for unrelated word pairs; there was no sleep-wake difference for related word pairs. At the 24-hour retest, with all subjects having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, subjects' memories were superior when sleep occurred shortly after learning, rather than following a full day of wakefulness.

"Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory. What's novel about this study is that we tried to shine light on sleep's influence on both types of memory by studying unrelated and related word pairs," Payne says."Since we found that sleeping soon after learning benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to rehearse any information you need to remember just prior to going to bed. In some sense, you may be 'telling' the sleeping brain what to consolidate."