Get the Gist is a summarizing strategy that assists students in determining the main idea of a section within the text. By summarizing and synthesizing information, students are ultimately learning how to retain and recall important information.

Students with learning disabilities tend to have difficulty recalling information. Students also struggle to locate key details/evidence from the text to support their answers. In order to assist students with reading comprehension, it is important to summarize a text's components (i.e., sections, paragraphs, pages, text features). This helps students know which section of the text to refer to when responding to multiple choice and written response questions.

To promote generalization, the teacher can use collaborative learning. Students can be assigned to groups and the teacher can give each group either an article, a few pages in a textbook, a newspaper article, or a scholastic to work on. Students can be given a question to answer and will have to use the framework for Get the Gist to summarize the key components of the text.