Measures. All students were pre- and post- tested on the same 100-item cloze test used in Experiment 1. In addition, the experimental students wrote a summary of the first book they read, and repeated this procedure with a different book at the end of the academic year. These summaries were done without consulting the book and were rated by three native speakers. The judges had no knowledge of whether the papers they read were written at the beginning or end of the year, and were asked to rate each essay as "good", "average", and "not good", using any criteria they wished. In addition, experimental subjects also filled out a brief questionnaire during the final session.

Results

Cloze test. Table 2 presents pre- and post-test scores for all four groups.

As expected, the two-year college students had lower pre-test scores. It is clear from Table 2 that the experimental groups in both institutions made better gains than the regular students, and in both cases the differences were statistically significant (for university students: t = 4.991, df = 72, p < 0.001; for junior college students: t = 5.035, df = 46, p < 0.001).

Writing. Table 3 presents judgments for each of the three judges individually. In every case, more summaries were classified as "good" in the post-test than in the pre-test. To allow statistical analysis, "average" and "not good" categories were collapsed.

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