Summarization

Teaching readers to summarize makes them more aware of how ideas based on the text are related. Readers learn to identify main ideas, leave out details, generalize, create topic sentences, and remove redundancy. Through example and feedback, a reader can be taught to apply these summarization rules to single- or multiple-paragraph passages by first summarizing individual paragraphs and then constructing a summary or spatial organization of the paragraph summaries.

In eighteen studies on summarization with students from grades three to eight examined by the NRP, readers improved the quality of their summaries of text not only by identifying the main ideas but also by leaving out detail, including ideas related to the main idea, generalizing, and removing redun­dancy. Further, the instruction of summarization improves memory for what is read, both in terms of free recall and answering questions. For example, in 1984 Thomas W. Bean and Fern L. Steenwyk examined whether training sixth-grade readers in rules for summarization developed in 1983 by Ann L. Brown and Jeannie D. Day would improve comprehension. They found that readers receiving summarization instruction either by rule-governed or intuitive-summarization techniques performed better than controls who were told to find main ideas but who had no explicit instruction. The summarization-trained students significantly outperformed the control group in the quality of their summaries and on a standardized test.