To assist students with summarizing, one effective strategy is to explicitly teach students a few steps or rules that will help them to develop a summary. The rules that follow are adapted for younger students from the rule-based summarizing strategy (Brown, Campione, & Day, 1981).
This issue of the T-TAC Network News focuses on instructional strategies that are research-based and proven to improve student achievement. Highlighted are the strategies of summarizing and note taking with which most teachers are familiar and, therefore, may be less inclined to give much attention. While summarizing and note taking may seem straightforward, upon further examination, it becomes evident that they actually involve complex mental processes.
Researchers suggest that it is important to decide which parts of the information are important and which parts are more trivial or repetitive. Marzano et al. (2001) state that “When summarizing, we must delete some information, reword some ideas, and reorganize information. Similarly, with note taking, we must synthesize material, prioritize pieces of data, restate some information, and organize concepts, topics and details” (p. 55).
To assist students with summarizing, one effective strategy is to explicitly teach students a few steps or rules that will help them to develop a summary. The rules that follow are adapted for younger students from the rule-based summarizing strategy (Brown, Campione, & Day, 1981).
1. Cross out extra material that is not important for your understanding.
2. Cross out words that are repeating information.
3. Create general words for more specific words (e.g., fruit for apples and oranges).
4. Look for the topic sentence. If missing, create your own topic sentence.
Articles in this newsletter provide additional information on classroom practice to improve student skills with summarizing information and note taking. If you find yourself interested in more in-depth study on effective instruction please visit the T-TAC ODU library either in person or at www.ttac.odu.edu and click the library tab.
References
Brown, A.L., Campione, J.C., & Day, J. (1981). Learning to learn: On training students to learn from texts. Educational Researcher, 10, 14-24.
Marzano, R., Norford, J.,Paynter, D., Pickering, D., & Gaddy, B. (2001). A handbook for classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
