Summarizing

Effect Size .79

Definition

Summarizing facilitates learning by providing opportunities for students to capture, organize, and reflect on important facts, concepts, ideas, and processes they will need to access at a later time. It usually is paired with note-taking.

Summarizing teaches students how to discern the most important ideas in a text, how to ignore irrelevant information, and how to integrate the central ideas in a meaningful way. This increases comprehension.

Types

  • Rule-based summary
  • Reciprocal teaching
  • Summary Frames
    • Narrative Frames
    • Topic-Restriction-Illustration Frame
    • Definition Frame
    • Argumentation Frame
    • Problem-Solution Frame
    • Conversation Frame

When to Use

When you want students to demonstrate understanding of the important ideas and concepts from lectures, videos, and passages in a synthesized way.

Benefits:

  • Allows students to condense material into a manageable chunk of information.
  • Reinforces the learning and allows teachers to check for students understanding

Steps

  • Rule-based summary - Start with a passage to model a think aloud and then have the students work with a partner on a new passage to create a rule-based summary.
    1. Take out material that is not important to understanding
    2. Take out words that repeat information.
    3. Replace a list of things with one word that describes them.
    4. Find a topic sentence or create one if it is missing."
  • Summary Frames- include a set of questions to help frame the summary
  • Reciprocal Teaching - This allows students to be placed in a group of four and each student is given a role: summarizer, questioner, clarifier, and predictor. A student could play all four roles as well.