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4 Easy Teaching Strategies for Summarizing Skills
By Susan Fitzell

Summarizing is a life-long skill that greatly affects
student learning. It is also a skill that students struggle
with significantly. One of the worst consequences of a lack
of summarizing skills is the ease with which students will
mistakenly plagiarize. Early in my teaching career, I
noticed that when students were assigned a summarizing
assignment, they would simply copy sentences from the book –
rearranged. Rather than read a sentence and tell it in their
own words, they simply switched the wording around.

Not only were they simply copying, they were doing it
poorly. When I’d question their methodology and suggest that
they were plagiarizing, they were adamant that they were not
plagiarizing because what they wrote did not look exactly
the same as the text from which they were copying. Finally,
through trial and error, I discovered that if students read
a paragraph, then covered it, then stated what they read in
one sentence, they could often summarize the paragraph in
their own words.

Summarizing allows students to re-frame their understanding
by identifying key facts and concepts, filing information
away in long-term memory in a more concise way. Much
research has been done on the efficacy of summarizing.
Marzano, Pickering, and Pollack do an excellent job of
compiling and presenting that research in teacher-friendly
terms.

Here are four great ways to teach summarizing skills to your
students. {Click below for the full article. Our content is
always free, but please do support our sponsors.)

Four Easy Teaching Strategies for Summarizing Skills by Susan Fitzell

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