Lecture on Summarizing

Practice in summarizing improves students’ reading comprehension of fiction and nonfiction alike, helping them construct an overall understanding of a text, story, chapter, or article (Rinehart, Stahl & Erickson, 1986)

Summarizing is a strategy in which readers sort through the information presented in a text in order to pull out and paraphrase the essential ideas. It requires readers to determine what is important, to condense this information, and to state it in their own words (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007). For narrative text, this strategy focuses on story elements; and for expository text, the focus is on main ideas. In its synthesis of research, the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) found that providing instruction in summarizing helps students learn to identify main ideas, differentiate important from unimportant ideas, and remember what they read, both in free recall and in answering questions.

Doing summaries reinforces connections among the new ideas students must learn and creates connections between new ideas and prior knowledge. Teachers at times tend to believe that summary writing is easy, and students should be able to do it without being taught; teachers will sometimes make an assignment to “read and summarize the article,” for example, without much direction

A summary written for content area reading has four defining features: (a) It is short, (b) it tells what is most important to the author, (c) it is written "in your own words," and (d) it states the information "you need to study." We can make this powerful learning strategy available to high school and college students by teaching students to think about the passage and relate the ideas to one another to construct a summary rather than select sentences from the passage.

Summarizing requires students to comprehend, analyze, and synthesize ideas. This is not just spitting back an answer! The reader processes text in one form, makes judgments about the ideas, and restates the text in a new form. This requires higher level thinking. A summary is a shortened version of an original text. A summary should include all main ideas and important details, while reflecting the structure and order of the original.

How to Teach Summarization

Teaching summarizing is no small undertaking. It’s one of the hardest strategies for students to grasp, and one of the hardest strategies for you to teach. You have to repeatedly model it and give your students ample time and opportunities to practice it.

Critical components to students’ understanding of the overall process of summarizing text: 1) pulling out main ideas, 2) focusing on key details, 3) using key words and phrases, 4) breaking down the larger ideas, 5) writing only enough to convey the gist, and 6) taking succinct but complete notes. When using the strategy of reciprocal teaching, the teacher and students take turns modeling summarization. With this technique, students are provided with many opportunities to observe others summarizing and also to participate in creating their own summaries.

It is critical for students to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their summaries. Reading Skills Important to Summarization

· Conflict/Resolution

· Character Differences, Goals, and Motivations

· Main Ideas and Details

· Making Generalizations

The idea is to give students a chance to summarize some key ideas, rethink them in order to focus on those that they are most intrigued by, and then pose a question that can reveal where their understanding is still uncertain. Often, teachers use this strategy in place of the usual worksheet questions on a chapter reading, and when students come to class the next day, you're able to use their responses to construct an organized outline, to plot on a Venn diagram, to identify sequence, or isolate cause-and-effect. The students are into it because the discussion is based on the ideas that they found, that they addressed, that they brought to class.

What is Summarizing?

Summarizing is the ability to produce a condensed version of information. The summary includes only important elements and retains the order of the original information.

Why is Summarizing Important?

Students' written summaries provide an excellent source for assessing students' understandings of summarizing.

Summarizing is important because it benefits both the teacher and student.

For the student

- it provides an opportunity to communicate what is important

- it serves as a way to check understanding

- it provides practice in decision making and sequencing

For the teacher

- it provides evidence of the student’s ability to select important information

- it is an informal indicator of comprehension

- it reveals a student’s ability to prioritize and sequence

Rinehart, S.D., Stahl, S.A., & Erickson, L.G.(1986). Some effects of summarization training on reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 422-435.