The ability to identify and explain the key information in a narrative text is crucial in educational applications of cognitive research on writing summaries.

This skill entails integrating the sentences in a story one has read or heard, recognizing the text’s more general, superordinate meanings, and deploying inferential and interpretative processes to formulate and organize its core nuclei. (Balboni, 2013).

There is consensus in the education/learning literature concerning the role of readers’ initial schemas and expectations (Boscolo, 1997) - along with their emotional/affective and cultural baggage, competences, and past experience - in guiding their understanding, interpretation, and evaluation of a story, which are also influenced by the text itself (Levorato, 2000), within a dynamic and iterative meaning-making process (Van Dijk, Kintsch, 1997). The literature also emphasizes that a dialogical approach can help to make explicit the factors driving the identification of key information, as well as potential misunderstandings and/or distortions of understanding (Lumbelli, 1992), and thus to regulate the teaching-learning process as appropriate. In continuity with this line of inquiry, studies are needed on the mechanisms underpinning discussion and how it can foster the transfer of competences to new texts.

This exploratory study examined the educational functionality of a learning unit (LU) “The team in action” designed to enhance primary students’ ability to represent and explain the key information in a narrative text. Specifically, it assessed whether and to what extent:

-             the design of the educational intervention was in keeping with the development and implementation of the educational offering and potential improvements could be identified;

-             the proposed activities elicited discussion and reflection, informing interpretative schemas and processes and thereby fostering gains in the target competence.

A further aim was to record additional “insights” offered by the research setting.

Intentionally designed on clear theoretical-methodological grounds, the LU combines insights from the state-of-the-art literature on simulation games and lessons with recent advances in the fields of Italian language teaching and educational psychology. It comprises a simulation game and a set of lessons (Piu, 2017).

Playing the roles of a director, a set designer, and actors, the participants in the game are asked to address a problematic situation and to subsequently discuss, under the teacher’s moderatorship, what they have experienced and discovered. Their task is to advise the artistic director of a theatre on how to make short theatrical offerings more entertaining.

After the game, the teacher delivers two lessons focused on explaining the key learning concepts: group exercises are followed by individual exercises, and finally by targeted, constructive individual feedback.

The proposed texts feature explicit information, limited inferences, standard lexicon, and linear logical-sequential development.

The LU lays the ground for:

-          fostering learning via progressive guided discovery, within a setting organized around constraints, including the intrinsic cognitive load given by the complexity of the learning task (Paas, Renkl, Sweller, 2003);

-          promoting meaningful learning, and consequently direct engagement with the text (Balboni, 2013), understood as a language unit and working with it to construct meaning; 

-          getting the children to share their meanings and discoveries, by interacting, debating, and cooperating with peers, under the supervision of the teacher, thus integrating the cognitive and social dimensions of their learning and sense-making trajectories (Pontecorvo, Ajello, Zucchermaglio, 2007);

-          adapting feedback to the participants’ current level of competence, thus eliciting regulation within their individual proximal development zones (Vygotskij, 1980),  with a view to enhancing  their self-efficacy and motivation to learn;

-          reflecting on the experience of participating in the simulation game and lesson, and analysing, systematizing, and generalizing from the content discovered and applied during the LU activities.

This exploratory study used a mixed-method approach to address the research questions and shed light on the complexity and dynamics of the phenomenon. It comprised: pre-testing; implementation, observation, and video-recording of the simulation game with groups of children (6/7 max); two lessons with class group; post-testing. The following research instruments were deployed. Pre- and post-tests to verify whether the LU fostered gains in participants’ ability to read and summarise a text (of equivalent complexity and length to the LU texts). One point was awarded for each key item of information reported (Calvani, 2018). Errors of spelling and/or syntax did not affect the score, provided the sentence made sense. A further point was awarded if the target text was of the prescribed length. Maximum score per test was six points. Observation sheet to assess the match between the design and the execution of the simulation game and record other useful information. It covers both simulation and debriefing, in terms of five categories of behaviour: - unfolding of the game; time required for play; appropriateness/clarity of instructions; fulfilment of the objectives of the game; focus on the task and the learning objectives. Analysis of the video-recorded interactions between teacher/moderator and groups of pupils during the simulation game, especially the debriefing, the most meaningful and distinctive phase of the intervention. A discourse analysis perspective (Pontecorvo, 2007) was adopted to construct hypotheses based on interpretative categories emerging from the transcripts. We examined the interaction in terms of the emergence, development, and content of core themes. Our chosen unit of analysis was the discourse within a speech turn, and the thematic and interactive connections that it established with the rest of the discourse. Isolated turns (unconnected to earlier turns) were omitted from the analysis, as were the teacher’s utterances, whose sole function was to moderate the students’ participation. First, each speech turn was classified as either “isolated” or “connected”. The units were then coded by identifying the salient themes/topics that emerged from each and, based on the similarities found between the different turns, by defining and organizing categories, and calculating how frequently they recurred. Evaluation of the written texts and videos produced by the children during the simulation game, with a view to identifying the sub-competencies deployed (identification of sequences, setting, main information, organization/connection of information units), and relating this to the outcomes of the discourse analysis and the post-test.

Twenty-seven 9/10-year-old fifth-graders attending “Ottavio Jacquemet” school in Verrés, Aosta (Italy), and two teachers, participated in a 10-hour intervention in April/May 2021. The mixed-method research outcomes yielded novel perspectives. The quantitative data for all participants (pre-/post-test scores) indicated gains in their ability to identify/explain the key information in a text (pre-test: M = 4,2 SD = 0,9; post-test: M = 5,4; SD = 0,6 at p.<0.05). The qualitative data, concerning the educational process underpinning the simulation game, revealed that: 1. The debriefing session focused on the children’s experience, decision-making, and information processing during the game, as reflected in their video productions and verbalizations. 2. Discourse analysis of the debriefing showed, with 90% interrater agreement, that the children (divided into four groups) drew most frequently on the categories “text reconstruction and connection of information units” (Group I: 13.5 %; Group II: 27.7 %; Group III: 34.2 %; Group IV: 42.8 %) and “difference between sequences” (Group I: 53.1 %; Group II: 54.7 %; Group III: 24.1 %; Group IV: 41.4 %) to relate information items to the overall text, thereby facilitating: - identification of explicit information omitted from their productions but key to the story structure; - the revisiting, while discussing the different portions of the text, of interpretations not supported by textual cues in their videos. In contrast, the students only occasionally reformulated “key information and sequences” (Group I: 4.2%; Group II: 2.2%; Group III: 23.3%; Group IV: 15.7%) in isolation from the text. 3. Group III also discussed subjective reactions to the same texts and/or textual meanings (14.4%). 4. Original differences between sequences, often concerning story characters’ emotional experience, were identified, alongside standard discrepancies. Thus, the LU enables children to identify key textual information via a sense-making process, correct misunderstandings, and link portions of text; insights into children’s interaction with texts; a meaningful step towards developing summarizing skills.

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