Scaling Back to Essentials: Scaffolding Summarization With Fishbone Mapping

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

What's important and what's not? Students in grades 6 to 8 explore this question in pairs and cooperative groups as they complete fishbone maps that highlight the main ideas and relevant details from a cause-effect text. The lesson includes explicit instruction on how to use repeated references as a strategy for determining important information in a text and how to generalize main ideas from related details. Modeling and guided practice prepare students to use the strategies independently. As a final exercise, students write summaries of a content area text.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

Fishbone map template: Students use this helpful handout to identify main ideas that are important to the author of the article.

 

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Friend, R. (2001). Teaching summarization as a content area reading strategy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44, 320–329.

• Summarization, as an organizational study strategy, promotes "deep processing."� As students identify links to prior knowledge and connections to main ideas in text, they enhance comprehension and retention.
  
  
• A summary has four defining features: (a) it is short; (b) it tells what is most important to the author; (c) it is written "in your own words;" and (d) it states the information "you need to study."
  
  
• Teachers can promote student proficiency in summarization by providing direct instruction about two cues to text-based importance: repeated references in text structure and generalization from inferences.
  
  
• Semantic maps make explicit the relationships among main ideas and supporting details, as well as the overarching generalization that frames a text.

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