Summarize

Description:

Summarizing is taking large selections of text and reducing them to their bare essentials such as by identifying the key ideas or main points in a reading selection. Webster's Dictionary calls a summary the "general idea in brief form.”

When we ask students to summarize we want them to complete the following tasks:

• Strip away the redundant examples

• Focus on the heart of the matter

• Seek key words and phrases that manage to capture the essential meaning

• Save the main ideas and crucial details that support them

There is extensive research that shows that summarization is among the top nine most effective teaching strategies in the history of education (Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock, 2001).

Targeted Skills: Summarizing requires students to apply higher-level

thinking skills. Students must analyze information and synthesize it before they

can condense it.

Summarizing promotes the retention of knowledge through the use of engaging strategies designed to rehearse and practice skills for the purpose of moving knowledge into long-term memory.

When to use the strategy: During or After Reading

Example: A Gist Summary or “sum it up”

• Give your student a short article or excerpt from a novel or text book. Direct him or her to read the selection and underline the key words and main ideas.

• Have your student create a list of the “Main Idea Words.”

• Next, have students write a one-sentence summary of the article using as many main idea words as he or she can. Tell your student to imagine he or she only has $2.00, and each word used in the one-sentence summary will cost 10 cents. That means that they have to write a summary that has no more than 20 words!

You can adjust the amount they have to spend, and therefore the length of the summary, according to the text they are summarizing.

How to Differentiate or Adapt: The summarize strategy is a strategy that can be used with any content. You can differentiate by asking students for different types of summaries (one word, one sentence or even one page).

Differentiate by requiring students who have difficulty comprehending or who are dealing with challenging text to summarize chunks of the text rather than the entire work. Have students read one paragraph at a time, stop at the end of each paragraph, and then asking some questions to find the main idea and supporting details. Students can tell someone what they think the paragraph is about, or they can write it.