Module Seven: Summarizing Strategies
Objectives
During this module you will
- Analyze the importance of summarizing to content reading.
- Become aware of the important linkage of note taking to summarizing.
- Reflect and summarize your learning thus far in the course.
- Generate a strategy that is useful to summarizing.
Introduction
- Have you ever had the experience with a student who thought he/she was giving you a great oral or written summary of a text or story, but during the lengthy "retelling" maybe your mind wandered?
- Did the length of the report begin to rival the length of the original text?
- Perhaps the student rambled on, providing every detail in the very sequence found in the original text.
Retelling
Overly detailed descriptions that replicate the original texts are known as "retellings." While that may be acceptable or even a literacy milestone for beginning readers, for older students it indicates a deficit of summarizing skill.
Effective Summarizers
An effective summary, by comparison, requires the summarizer to do the following:
- Pick and choose details, sometimes plunging deep into the material
- Frequently omit some of the content
- Sometimes abstracting inferences and personal connections from the text.
Good summarizers will be able to use their summarizing skills to write interesting reports, research papers, and essays.
Undesirable Summarizing Behaviors!
As the volume of required content text reading increases for older students, the ability to summarize material becomes increasingly more important. Students frustrated by their inability to summarize and synthesize sometimes rely on undesirable shortcuts.
A recent study of high schoolers indicated the following undesirable behaviors:
- 15% said they have submitted a paper from a term paper mill or website
- 52% copied a few sentences
- 90% of the Internet plagiarizers also plagiarized from written sources.
Frustrated over their lack of summarizing skills, many students are attracted to such short cuts that prevent real growth in reading comprehension ability.
Summarizing and Standardized Tests
Two of the most frequently used questions on standardized tests require students either to summarize or to make an inference. Following the reading of a short passage on those tests, students have to choose the "best" inference or summary statement from an array of foils. Among the attractive but wrong answers is usually a “retelling” foil rather than a summary statement or a fact foil rather than an inference. Practice and experience in recognizing valid inferences or a valid generalized summary statement has become a high stakes reading skill.
Summarizing: You "Gotta" Play Shortstop
In our baseball model for reading comprehension, summarizing lies somewhere between 2nd base "plain sense" (literal understanding) and 3rd base (inferential "reading between the lines"). Pure 2nd base retelling of the text is literal plain sense retelling, not summarizing. Overly done 3rd base processing is too much speculative reading into the text. A good summary draws from both "bases" in a balance of retelling and selective inferring.
Effective Summarizers
Research in summarizing suggests the following:
- Reading comprehension increases when students are taught summarizing strategies.
- Effective summarizers use a combination of both verbal and visual methods to abstract ideas from text.
- Students have to dig deep into texts to determine what is important, what isn't, and how to restate the information.
- Note taking skill is inextricably linked to summarizing ability. Students who take extensive notes, who accompany the notes with sketches or visuals, and who review and revise them become better summarizers.
Proceed to Module Seven Activities.