ABSTRACT
These results do not indicate that children with TBI form inaccurate mental representations of textual information. Rather, the summarization pattern shown by the majority of the children with severe TBI suggest that they continue to construct meaning at lower levels-being tied more to the lowest level of meaning as conveyed by the individual pieces of information. They displayed a marked reduction at intermediate levels of making inferences across sentences and at higher levels where summary statements are constructed to represent the global meaning of the text as a whole. It has been suggested that encoding information at lower-superficial levels makes the later retrieval of information more effortful and less likely since detail-based memory tends to be more transient over time (van Dijk, 1995). Moreover, the bias toward detail based encoding has been associated with low achievement in classroom contexts (Brown & Day, 1983; Johnson, 1983; Malone & Mastropieri, 1992; Stein & Kirby, 1992).
