Summarizing

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. Teaching students to summarize improves their memory for what is read. Summarization strategies can be used in almost every content area.

Why use summarizing?

• It helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate important details that support them.

• It enables students to focus on key words and phrases of an assigned text that are worth noting and remembering.

• It teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for more concise understanding.

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/summarizing