The effect of reciprocal teaching approach on the development of summarization skills in 3rd grade primary school students

Focusing on summarization skills as a component of reading comprehension abilities, the aim of this study is to examine the effect of the reciprocal teaching approach on the development of summarization skills in 3rd-grade primary school students. The study, which employs a quasi-experimental design, was conducted with two groups of fifteen students each, formed through random assignment at a public school in the central district of Bolu province during the 2023-2024 academic year. The implementation process of the study lasted 8 weeks. In the experimental group, a teaching program prepared in accordance with the reciprocal teaching approach was implemented by the researcher. In the control group, the existing teaching process was continued by the classroom teacher. During the implementation process, various types of texts and illustrated children's books selected by experts were used. Before the instruction of summarization strategies, a pre-test was administered to students in both groups, and a post-test was administered after the instructional activities. Data were collected using the Summary Scoring Key and analyzed with the SPSS 26 software package. According to the results obtained from the data analysis, a significant difference in favor of the post-test results was found in both the experimental group, where the reciprocal teaching approach was applied, and the control group, where the existing teaching continued. The applied approaches positively influenced students' summarization performance. Although there was no significant difference between the post-test summarization scores of the experimental and control groups, when the effect size (r) was examined, it was found that the intervention in the experimental group had a moderate effect. This indicates that the increase in performance of the students in the experimental group may suggest the potential benefits of such interventions in educational practice. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that both the reciprocal teaching approach and the existing teaching approach positively impact the development of students' summarization skills.