Evaluation of the development of summary ability in educational environments created according to the parallel distributed infromation processing model

This research was carried out to examine the reflections of 7th Grade Turkish course educational environments created according to the parallel distributed information processing model on the development of students' summarization skills. By making use of the parallel distributed information processing model, the summarization skill was divided into the cognitive operations of sorting, classifying, parsing, deleting, selecting, associating, generalizing and transforming, and teaching activities suitable for the model were designed and applied to the students. The research was structured with action research and quantitative and qualitative data collection tools were used. The participants of the study consist of the researcher, students and members of the validity committee. The research was conducted in the classroom; rucbric, semi-structured interview form, reflective diary and students' activity papers were determined as data collection tools. According to the data obtained from the rubric, six students, two of whom were low level, two middle level and two high level, were determined as the focus group. According to the results of the research, when the students' scores before and after the application were compared, it was seen that there was a significant increase in all dimensions of the students' rubric. According to the data obtained from the activity sheets of the focus group, students' success in sorting, deleting, associating, generalizing and transforming is at the expected level. In the parsing process, while the students showed average success at the beginning of the application, their success at the end of the application was at the expected level. As teacher support decreased in the classification and selection processes, it was observed that the success of the students in the lower and middle groups was not at the expected level. In activities where all processes were run simultaneously, it was observed that as teacher support decreased, students in the lower and middle groups were not successful at the expected level. The findings obtained from reflective diaries and semi-structured interviews confirm the data of the research. Based on the research results, future research should pay attention to cognitive processes in the design of outcomes and activities, and provide more teacher support for the lower and middle groups. Key Words: Turkish education, parallel distributed information processing model, summarization skill, reading comprehension, action research.