Il Summarizing Test U: uno strumento per lo sviluppo dei talenti all’Università

Summarizing is one of the main processes for reading comprehension. However, in the Italian scientificliterature, tools are not widespread to measure the practice of this competence, nor to supportits development and improvement in university students. In order to hypothesize a didacticmodel to help university students monitor their own cognitive activities and their intellectualstrengths for creativity - differently from how they normally use them - it is necessary to use initialself-evaluation tools that allow the early identification and understanding of the reasons for academicfailure. This means that systematic and periodic plans must be set to identify the most diversetalent types.This paper analyses the results of a preliminary study to construct a tool for measuring universitystudents’ summarizing ability. The data analysis of the pilot experimentation of the SummarizingTest U reveals that it is a potentially promising tool, which can support other existing tools forreading comprehension. This exploratory study aims to provide possible indications both for afollowing redefinition of the items and for the development of a questionnaire to observe thesummarizing ability in the same academic contexts.