1. What is one of the most powerful comprehension strategies?
Summarizing

2. What Does the Research Say?
“No matter how the writing variable has been measured, the results are the same: as emphasis on classroom nonfiction writing grows, student achievement improves. We have evidence not only of reading and writing score improvement but of scores in math, science, and social studies improving as well.”
Doug Reeves
Founder of Leadership and Learning Center

3. In the early 1970’s, educational researchers began studying the effects of instruction on student learning.
With the assistance of Dr. Bob Marzano, McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning) analyzed selected research studies on instructional strategies that could be used in K-12 classrooms.
What they found was that 9 instructional strategies produced the highest yielding gains in student achievement.
While these findings are significant, it is important to remember that not they are not the only instructional strategies that should be used and that no instructional strategy works equally well in all situations.
Additional notes if needed:
(ES) or effect size expresses the increase or decrease in achievement of an experimental group (the group exposed to a specific instructional technique). These are measured in standard deviations (remember from stats classes 1 standard deviation above or below the mean is about 34% of your population).
Percentile Gain were configured by McREL using a statistical conversion table.
No. of ESs were the number of experimental studies that were examined for each strategy

4. Summarization
“Summarizing can be done in writing, but also orally, dramatically, artistically, visually, physically, musically, in groups, or individually. Summarization is one of the most underused teaching techniques we have today, yet research has shown that it yields some of the greatest leaps in comprehension and long-term retention of information.”
Rick Wormeli, from Summarization in Any Subject, 2005, p. 2

5. “Summarizing Summarizing”
Read article and feel free to mark the text so that you can go back and easily find points to discuss
At table groups – use the Final Word Protocol
Open discussion to questions around the teaching of summarization

6. What is summarizing?
Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials:
the key ideas
the main points that are worth noting
and remembering

7. What are we doing when we summarize?
We strip away the extra. We focus on the heart of the matter. We try to find the key words and phrases that, when uttered later, still manage to capture the G.I.S.T of what we’ve read. We are trying to capture the main ideas and the crucial details for supporting them

8. Why summarize? Comprehension:
To reduce information to essential ideas in
order to:
Understand and learn important
information
Communication:
Expand the breadth and depth of your
writing

9. When you ask students to summarize, what usually happens?
They write down everything
They write down next to nothing
They write down way too much
They don’t write enough
They copy word for word

10. What did you want them to do?
Pull out main ideas
Focus on key details
Use key words and phrases
Break down the larger ideas
Write only enough to convey gist
Take succinct but complete notes

11. Establishing a Focus…
The main idea is the most important information or concept in a text or statement.
Sometimes the main idea is explicit; sometimes it is implied.
Not all information is equal: some of it clearly is more important than the rest.
Templeton, 1997

12. Main idea and supporting details GO

13. Summarizing
Let’s Practice one paragraph at a time

14. Example paragraphs…
A tornado is a powerful, twisting windstorm. It begins high in the air, among the winds of a giant storm cloud. People who have watched a tornado’s howling winds reach down from the sky have said it’s the most frightening thing they have ever seen. In some parts of the United States, these windstorms are called twisters or cyclones.

15. Main idea and supporting details

16. Summary Sentence
Tornadoes are frightening, powerful, twisting windstorms sometimes called twisters or cyclones that start in giant storm clouds.

17. Tornadoes cont…
Tornadoes are not the only whirling windstorms that move through the earth’s air. Dust devils, hurricanes and typhoons all have twisting winds. But these windstorms differ from tornadoes in important ways.

18. Main idea and supporting details

19. Summary Sentence
Dust devils, hurricanes and typhoons also have twisting winds, but they are different from tornadoes.

20. Tornadoes cont…
Dust devils are the weakest of the swirling windstorms. Their winds usually spin between 12 and 30 miles per hour. Most dust devils are less than five feet across, and few last more than a minute or two. They are often seen in the desert under clear skies. Dust devils form near ground when certain kinds of winds make hot, rising air start to spin.

21. Main idea and supporting details

22. Summary Sentence
Compared to other wind storms, dust devils are the weakest and least severe.

23. Hurricanes and typhoons are the largest of the swirling windstorms
Hurricanes and typhoons are the largest of the swirling windstorms. The winds of these storms blow about 75 to 150 miles per hour. They form over warm, tropical oceans and cause heavy rains as well as strong winds. When a tropical storm like this begins over the Atlantic Ocean or the eastern Pacific Ocean, it is called a hurricane. The same kind of storm in the western Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean is called a typhoon. Hurricanes and typhoons may be several hundred miles wide, travel thousands of miles and last for days.

24. Main idea and supporting details

25. Summary Sentence
In contrast, hurricanes and typhoons are the largest windstorms since they may be hundreds of miles wide, travel very fast for thousands of miles and can last for days.

26. Tornadoes are not as large as hurricanes and typhoons and they don’t travel as far. In fact, many tornadoes last only a few minutes. But the spinning winds of a tornado can rip through the air at up to 300 miles per hour. The winds of a large tornado are the fastest, most dangerous winds on earth.

27. Main idea and supporting details

28. Summary Sentence The bottom line is this:
although they are not as large as hurricanes and typhoons, tornadoes are the fastest, most dangerous windstorms.

29. What next?
Have students write successively shorter summaries, constantly refining and reducing their piece until only the most essential and relevant information remains.
They can start with half a page; then try to get it down to two paragraphs; then one paragraph; then two or three sentences

30. Idea
Teach students to go with the newspaper mantra: have them use the key words or phrases to identify only Who, When, Where, Why, and How.
Take articles from the newspaper, and cut off their headlines. Have students practice writing headlines for (or matching severed headlines to) the “headless” stories
Article for this

31. Sum it Up
Have students imagine they are placing an ad in the newspaper
Each word costs $.10 and then can spend $2.00
Adjust the amount depending on readiness and ability. This can be a station or anchor activities when students finish another assignment
Handouts for this