Summarizing: The Development of a Transdisciplinary Competence

The article discusses the development of the summarizing competence, which begins in early education with the development of narrating, reporting, and expression skills and continues in primary school with the same type of activities and learning opportunities. In the first gymnasium grade the student encounters summarizing as a process and the summary as a product of learning, which will gradually become an assessable product. The summarizing competence is formed and developed through an assimilation of knowledge and schemes of action, initially and prevalently during the study of the language of instruction and its literature; however, all other subjects studied at the gymnasium stage help expand and enhance it. The fact that, rather than remain a mere object of linguistics, summarizing becomes a test of intellectual work skills speaks decidedly in favor of qualifying it amongst transdisciplinary competences.