3. Summarizing and Note Taking
Answer either question (you choose the one) thoroughly and give examples.
- This chapter describes “summarizing” as a process of deleting, substituting, and keeping information. Although these three aspects of the process are easy to understand and model, students often find it difficult to summarize effectively. Describe some reasons you think that summarizing is such a challenge for students. (Houston says, “I always think everything is important. In college, my favorite professor taught Russian History. The way he lectured always produced “story-like” notes from me.” Do you tell stories to your students?)
- This chapter combines note taking with the process of summarizing, suggesting that they are closely related. How do you think these two processes are similar and different? (This will practice the previous chapter’s skills
.)
July 9th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I think summarizing is difficult for the same reason that making a decision is so difficult for kids. Many kiddos do not know how to make decisions or they are afraid to commit to a decision because they do not feel confident enough to decide –just as they cannot decide what’s important enough to include and NOT INCLUDE in a summarization. Just listen to them speak..they ramble….just the way they do when writing a summarization.
Notetaking IS SUMMARIZING what you hear/observe. It is the same thing as summarizing but usually you do it during an oral lecture/discussion. Typically you have less time to “summarize” notetaking than you would if asked to write a summarization about something that you have read. Plus you cannot “go back” when listening to a lecture/oral discussion – snap decisions are required to know exactly what is important enough to include in your notes as you listen/view.
July 9th, 2008 at 9:04 am
EXAMPLES: Anytime a teacher uses “stories” in their instruction, the students will remember what is said! It’s amazing—- the vocabulary words that I give examples for, such as, “Don’t you have an odious little brother or sister?” The kids will remember and use ‘odious’ the whole year. Or when I say that I remember my dad eating ice cream, and I thought is was so funny how he would giggle and say, “This ice cream titillates my tongue.” The kids DO remember and use odious and titillates all year long.
July 10th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I choose “B”
When you summarize, you are processing to get the most important information that is being presented, the “meat” of the information. The exercise shown in Fig. 3.2 was a dramatic example of this process. I usually think of summarizing being expressed in sentences and paragraphs and can be written or given orally.
(Example)For an essay question, I want a student to summarize the most important points of a topic, writing in complete sentences, paragraph form.
Note-taking is also trying to glean the most important facts/ideas.(similar)I agree with Donna that more often notes are written listening to an oral presentation. The strategy I try to teach my students is to write key phrases, bullet points, and/or write it as they would a text message. (Their daily notes are a graded assignment.) Then, as they review their notes they can piece it together, translate it (different).
(Example) I require my students to use their daily notes when we review for a test. I encourage them to add information they may have missed the first time around and provide them with highlighters to mark the most important data, or what they didn’t remember from when we discussed it in class and know they need to spend more time studying.
If you don’t have the skills to eliminate unnecessary material (summarize), your notes will be excessive and not very effective.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I think summarization is hard for students because it’s something that they don’t get the opportunity to practice much in their lives. Most of the information that they receive in their environment is in short, already summarized, snipits. Parents either don’t have the time (or don’t take the time) to have extended talks or give detailed instructions to their children. Television news and programs are already in distilled form. Children don’t even have extended conversations with one another – they text in shorthand. Because these outside means of providing information are reduced to the lowest common denominator, vocabulary aquisition is stunted as well. This makes comprehension a problem, and therefore, summariztion as well.
Many children don’t get the opportunity to sort through their parents’ conversation at dinner and glean the main ideas mentally. Gone are the days where they’d have to sort through the thoughts in a newspaper article, letter, or email in order to boil down the writer’s main points.
School is, for many students, the only place where summarization skills need be practiced.
Teacher’s must model the skill. It is the most efficient means of helping students. Modeling provides a chance for teachers to help students develop vocabulary aqusition while training them in methods to get at the “meat” of the material. I plan to use the tools taught in this chapter in my classroom this year.
July 11th, 2008 at 10:23 am
I think the problem with summarizing is the student’s inability to decide what is important. In an oral lecture, students do not have the luxury of extended time to make decisions as to what is important, so the result in many cases is the student trying to write down everything you say and complain that you are going too fast. Of course this leads to the student having incomplete thoughts written down and often missing the important points. Listening skills are also something that our students need to work on. Do you remember outlines? When I was in school we used outlines to summarize important ideas of a chapter. Most of our students have no idea what an outline is.
In history, we usually do tell stories to explain the events in US History to our students. I agree with Donna it is amazing what students can remember if we present that information in a why they can relate. In History we use a lot of graphic organizers that help guide the students to what is the most important information. The challenge in History is that we do want the students to understand the most important points but we also need them to understand why it is important.
July 14th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Choosing the second question…I believe note-taking and summarization are linked (similar) because our notes are an interpretation of the information we receive (either audible or visual). That is essentially a summary of the information we’ve been given. I agree with Mrs. Sanderson that when you summarize, you are processing to get the most important information that is being presented, and what she also referred to as the “meat” of the information.
I suppose the difference between the two is the interpretation a student gets from the material being presented. I had a college professor who took note-taking to a very elementary level. We were able to print off “fill-in-the-blank” notes that matched the PowerPoint he presented. As we followed along in the lecture, we made sure to fill in that valuable information (aka, the blanks). So, each and every student had the same notes…and what we chose to summarize from that was up to us. If he did a good job in presenting the material where we UNDERSTOOD, and we listened, it was easy to make the proper summarization.
Without help in note-taking, students have a very hard time with summarizing the points they need to be successful on the material tested/understood; the jist of most of the comments above.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Can I address both?
I had never thought of explaining note taking in those steps. I’ve often told my students “You don’t have to write everything down” or tell them to make up their own abbreviations. I think that students can be like a pendulum – they think it’s ALL important or they think NONE of it’s important (which gets back to the issue of making learning relevant to them-grin). And I agree with Susan’s point earlier – they don’t have as much practice deciding what’s important – or deciding which ideas are just supporting a main concept. I try to help them make those distinctions, and I see progress as the year goes. Sometimes, they don’t WANT to think – they just want to take down what you say and think they should see that exact word for word piece of information on a test. They have a hard time even with notes – taking the information and applying it.
I think that summarizing is a tool for notetaking. If you can summarize using the Rules stated, then that summary becomes useful notes. I’ve struggled with notetaking my whole time in teaching (all whopping 6 years of it), and I am definitely going to use some of the ideas from this chapter.
So, I think similarities between note taking and summarizing are that both involve picking out the “best bits”, kind of like digging through chex mix at a party. You take what is important to you and leave all the brazil nuts for somebody else. Both summarizing and note taking involve reducing a large amount of information to a size more easily dealt with.
I think the differences are that summarizing (in my opinion – not being an ELA teacher, I’m probably off base) requires more….what is the term I’m searching for…discretion? on the part of the person doing the work. For instance – when you summarize a paragraph, or the main idea of an article or chapter, you are synthesizing and reducing to a central idea or them. In note taking, the instructor has decided what is important (and we all think EVERYTHING we put on the screen is important!) it’s just a matter of how can you chop it up, reduce it, but still be able to remember what the main idea presented was. To me, notes are like the recipe and ingredients, and summarizing is like the digestion. You can shorten Tablespoon to Tb, but you sure can’t leave it out. However, describing the taste and experience of a new dish would be like the summary.
Does that make sense? Can you tell I started a new diet (in addition to working out) this week – I’m obsessed with food metaphors!
July 25th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Summarizing is a challenge for students because they must analyze the information at a deep level before they can know what to delete or keep. I just went through the TALA training and we spent a half day on summarizing and notetaking. It was pointed out to us that students have not been taught how to take notes. Consequently – they write down everything rather than take the chance of leaving out something important. ‘Oh well – better to have too much than not enough.” Students are not aware of the struture of the text or how authors organize it. If we teach them how text is organized they can better decided what to include in their summaries and notes. Yes, I tell stories to my students – probably more than they want me to.
Summarizng and note taking are closely related. Note taking is what the student is doing when he hears or sees the text for the first time. Summarizing is what he does to understand his notes and make sense of them. Note taking is an active behavior. Summariziing is more reflective. The TALA notebook has some great graphic organizers for taking notes and then going back and writing a summary of those notes. We learned about scaffolding the note taking and summarizing learning with the students. They call it I do, we do, you do. Jim Burke – my favorite English guy – has some great graphic organizers, too.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:43 am
This response is brought to you by PILOT Easy Touch ink pens which are great for summarizing.
Summarizing is such a challenge for students in middle school at WMS for a myriad of reasons. One possible reason is a lack of vocabulary. It is hard to “put things in general terms” when they lack general terminology. Most of our students have a synonym vocabulary one word deep if we are lucky. What is another name for chairs? Seats. What else? Uhh, I don’t know. You get my drift.
Second, the act of deleting information is difficult to teach to students who could care less about a particular topic. When teaching summarizing as a test taking strategy for TAKS, all the time I get kids who have heard, been taught and walked through how to summarize a paragraph. Yet, they write a summary in a compliant mode so as to delete nearly everything. Others just hate writing or reading, so their ability to summarize never moves past their academic discomfort.
Finally, keeping information in a summary is a difficult thing for a middle school kid to do because they are still such novices in most areas. I know the first time I took notes in an English class over a peice of literature was so different from the way I summarized notes over literature by the time I was a senior in college. As a student truly becomes a student of a particular field, their ability to summarize will drastically improve. So, middle school teachers need to lay a foundation on which high school teachers can build, but ultimately I believe it is in our post secondary schooling that students should reap the benefits of summarization.
August 3rd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
I think student have a hard summarizing because life is summarized for them. TV, movies, parent’s conversations are already abbreviated for them. I remember asking my parents questions and we would go to the Encyclopedia Britannica and look them up. We would pour over a book for hours, one idea leading to another and then another. We would have those big, heavy, burgundy books all over the kitchen table. Today when a student has a question, they Google it. It is already summarized for them.
As teachers, we have only so many minute to get an idea across. I used to love to read Sir Cumference and the Knights of the Round Table to introduce circumfernce. It was a fun but time consuming piece of literature. I have had to give these kinds of lessons up due to time constraints. In essence, I am summarizing for them and not giving them the opportunity to learn summarization in my math classes. While I don’t have an answer as to when this will change, I know I am not teaching summarization and that something needs to be done about this.
August 9th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
For my kids I believe the summarizing skill needs to begin with felling comfortable with the note taking skill. I try to simplify that procedure as much as possible. I draw on my experience of taking notes. Whenever I am in a lecture situation, I have to be writing in order to stay with the speaker. I use the informal outline form. I even use it in church in order to keep my mind from wandering while the preacher is speaking. Cute as he is, sometimes I do drift off.
Anyway, I use that as a guide for my students whenever we are talking about grammar. Take notes. Do it like this. Now you have a great study guide. What I need to do now is take it one step further. Have them take their notes home and write a summary paragraph describing what they have learned. Good idea!
August 18th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
This chapter describes “summarizing” as a process of deleting, substituting, and keeping information. Although these three aspects of the process are easy to understand and model, students often find it difficult to summarize effectively. Describe some reasons you think that summarizing is such a challenge for students.
As I read this I found myself agreeing with what the book said and what Karen had echoed. Students have to be able to have a deep understanding of material to differentiate what is and isn’t important enough to write down. I think that this is a big problem with our students. Especially if they are reading the material. They may be able to word-call the information with great clarity but then if they are quizzed about what they just read the student is often unable to tell you.
Also, I agree with what Lynn said. I also summarize the information in my class for them instead of letting them practice that skill for themselves. I think that is a function of time constraint as much as anything, but after reading this chapter maybe I am doing my students a disservice by not allowing them to summarize the information on their own.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Answering part 1:
I agree with others that summarizing is a skill students don’t get much practice with in their daily life. I also think students are intimidated by the skill. This leads to them not feeling comfortable with summarizing.
So what are they familiar with on a daily basis?
At my TCU AP Institute this summer a fellow teacher said he started using the “text message” summary strategy. I had never heard of it. Essentially, you tell the kids read and consider the text you want them to summarize. Then you tell them to write a text message to the teacher (using correct grammer – no shortcuts – and to write it on paper, not a cell phone) the “gist” of the reading. This teacher said that this has helped his students grasp summarizing. I know there is more to it than that and that you would need to “pre- teach” more and model what you are looking for, but I liked the concept and plan on trying it this year.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:28 am
I think students can summarize within their life. They can certainly break down what they want to do with thier Friday night or determine what will be most important to watch on TV. We just have to get them to use those skills to be able to summarize, note-take, and pick out important academic information down on paper. I think they have a difficulty with this skill because young people tend to think in order or sequentially or, as Donna, said they just “ramble.” They can tell you what happened in their day or in a story they are reading, but they can’t pick out the most important topics of that story. When summarizing, you have to think broadly, and they tend to think too narrowly. I think they have the most difficulty summarizing into their own words. They tend to just want to pull out sentences and copy them down, and, of course, summarizing takes a lot of thinking, and they often don’t want to use those brain cells.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Summarizing is difficult for middle school students because they are not sure what is important. Have you ever heard them tell a story? They want to tell every detail from waking up until going to sleep! They are not comfortable with using their own words, so they tend to just reword what was said. They are also formatted to “write what the teachers says is important” rather than using their own skills to say what is important. I will try to work harder on teaching this important skill.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I believe summarizing is difficult for students because they do not know what the most important events are in a story. They want to include everything and are unsure of what to leave out, therefore, including insignificant details.
I agree that storytelling is a great way to give notes because it makes the facts more interesting. I am not the best story teller and would like to incorporate more story telling in my teaching. I think it allows the student to get to know me and to be more interested in what I am teaching. Shannon – Thanks for sharing the story telling story. Does that make sense?
August 19th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Note taking is so much like summarizing. If students can’t grasp the main concepts as they do in summarizing, they will try to write down everything that is being said (or nothing at all). As Marzano points out, this can be done without even comprehending the information, kind of like reading and not knowing what you just read. When taking notes, students have to delete, substitute, and keep information just like summarizing.
August 19th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
From my own experience, I remember most of my high school teachers making our classes take notes just by listeneing to their stories/lectures. At first, I defintely experienced a learning curve and stuggled at the begining. But like all things, it came easier and easier as high school went on. By college, I was a pro. I had my own notetaking skills and techniques. I might not have remembered all the material I learned in high school but that was one skill that directly contributed to my success in college.
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
I guess I’m feeling a little touchy on this subject because I just dealt with summarization in my on-level classes today using newspaper articles. While I agree with Susan and Lynn, their lives are already pretty summarized in general, today I felt like it was lack of attention on the student’s part that caused much of the problem. My students simply were not paying careful attention to know what was important. The summaries would not have been too lengthy (the usual problem we see) if the information they reported had been more accurate. They simply had not focused; they were more interested in being “done”. What disappoints me most about that is that they even had choice in what they read in the newspaper.
I do agree that those students who write too much think it all must be important. I remember trying survive Lloyd Sizemore’s history classes at HHS that way at first, for those of you lucky enough to know him. One of the best teachers I ever had, but man–I had to learn quickly how to take my notes effectively or I was going to need carpal tunnel surgery by my senior year.
I think this is a skill that requires practice and modeling from the teacher for the student to master. It’s not something that happens overnight, but certainly one that needs our attention.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Note taking and summarizing, which both involve listening/reading and writing, usually at the same time, are often a challenge for students whose ability to process is not their greatest gift. Of the six frames presented by the authors, I prefer the problem/solution frame. It works well in many areas of Science and History, the two subjects that come through Content Mastery most often. Note taking can be broken down into smaller chunks than summarizing, but even summarizing, in smaller bites, is chewable!
September 24th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I feel three of the obstacles our students are facing when it comes to notetaking and summarizing are possibly:
One: Information overload. When we were in school, we had the opportunity to be totally focused without distractions from technology. The cell phone in their pocket, the Internet a few clicks from the task on a computer, and the desire to listen to other media while working. Information comes at our students at a rate that overwhelms us and we must remember they are tuned in, connected, and multitasking at an earlier age than we were.
Two: We talk too fast. Do we really pause enough to allow the student to recycle the information we are giving them, to actually write it down or type the words. Lecturing is an art – WE already know the information, and most of us repeat (sometimes to each other), but are we truly speaking slow enough for all learners and allowing time for them to learn to notetake. And, copying notes from devices is not the same as hearing, recycling what was aaid by the person and then writing.
Three: Will there be a need for notetaking in their future with the advances in technology? Our students consider these 2 words as synonyms: Information & Internet. If I forgot what the teacher said about a topic, I can “Google” it later and get what I need.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Here is a powerpoint I compiled for campus based teacher training. It covers similarities and differences, as well as, how to use these strategies with gifted learners.
http://www.birdville.k12.tx.us/schools/041/teachers/nyvall/documents/SimilaritiesandDifferences.ppt
October 1st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Here is a powerpoint I compiled reagrding summarization and notetaking. I also have an awesome book called Summarization in any Subject by Rick Wormeli, if anyone wants to look at it.
http://www.birdville.k12.tx.us/schools/041/teachers/nyvall/documents/SummarizationandNotetaking.ppt
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
I can pretty much say ditto to what Vanessa wrote. In fact, I was one of those students most of you wrote about. I can still have difficulty note taking and summarizing because sometimes I get lost in the details and miss the big picture or the context. To me, it all seems important. This is why it is so hard to summarize at the middle school level. It requires thinking and some just want to be spoon fed. We have to teach them to think for themselves and pick out what is relevant and what is fluff.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I am also one of the people that has difficulty with note taking. History was never a subject that I cared to read or study about. In college I had a history instructor who gave us an outline at the beginning of each class on what he would be presenting that day. This made my note taking much easier and I actually learned more history in that class than I had in any other history class. I agree with Gina and Heather that middle school is where the foundation is being laid and we need to do the modeling for the students. I also tend to summarize much of the information that is presented in class due time constraints, variation in student abilities and effort.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I agree that summarizing and note taking are closely related skills. Students need to be able to pare down information into smaller bites, so they take notes from the information first. This allows them to see the information in a more condensed form. Then from this condensed from they can “summarize” the paragraph, chapter, or story more effectively. I have been working on this with my SRS students and it is a hard skill to teach. Students by now can recognize a summary on the TAKS test pretty effectively through tricks we have taught them, but they cannot write one with clarity. I believe it is so hard for students to summarize because they are afraid they will leave out something important, they cannot tell the difference between what is important “main ideas” and what is not “details”.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Summarizing and note taking are skills that have to be taught at an early age and then reinforced throughout the student’s lives. Unfortunately, many students are asked to summarize or take notes in middle school when they have never really learned the correct method of note taking or summarizing. When this happens usually failure happens and the students get frustrated and cringe the next time they hear “please take notes” or “summarize what the story is about”. This can be avoided if students are taught the correct way to take notes and summarize at an early age and then positively reinforced as they make their way through school. Also, once students begin taking notes correctly and summarizing correctly, they will learn the value of these instructional strategies and will use them more often and will get better at both.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
There is one thing I know I’m guilty of; trying to sqeeze to much in at once while talking at the speed of light. I need to tap on the brakes and I’ll tell you why. Kids don’t take notes very well any more. I know, I know, you saying “No way!” Well, “Yes way.” This is skill that has been pushed aside in favor of TAKS importance. The students’ spelling is not great, their attention span is way short, and there seems to be something that is not quite right when they look up and then have to look down and write again. Something gets lost in translation. They just can’t seem to decifer what is important and it really gets their wires crossed. I have to walk them through the process after answering the one million “Can I borrow a pencil?” questions. I don’t mind though. It’s all about the kids, right?
November 12th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Effective summarizing and note taking is a related strategy that we all should use to support student learning. Without explicit instruction in note taking, however, many of our Warriors simply write down words or phrases word for word, without analysis (or good effect). Successful note-takers summarize to arrive at a nugget of meaning, which they are much more likely to retain. Students also benefit from using their notes as a document of their learning. We can prompt students to review and refine their notes, particularly when it is time to prepare for an exam, write a research paper, or other summative assessment of learning.
Frankly, I was never good at summarizing either as a student until now that I have to do reflections every week for my Masters. I believe summarizing will be difficult for kids if they never got the “Identifying Similarities and Differences” concept down.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:27 am
To effectively summarize, students must delete some information, substitute some information, and keep some information. To do this, students must analyze the information at a fairly deep level. My students are usually limited in their deep thought processes because of emotional or behavioral issues. The “group” session they attend each day helps them sort out their feelings and actions. When an incident happens and my students must tell about the incident, I give them a form to fill out. The form helps them tell about what happened in a logical sequence. My students are very concrete in their reporting or summarizing happenings.
November 17th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Summarizing and note taking is difficult for many because they do not think. They want a simple prompt or a simple task. Many will shut down when it requires thinking. They also have not really been taught “how” to do this until middle school and it is difficult. Baby steps can help them achieve success in summarizing. I have them summarize their notes and articles. Each time we do this, you would think I was asking them to write a full physics equation from memory. I keep pushing and do not give up on them
November 18th, 2008 at 8:12 am
I agree with Diane Cowell that note taking plays important role in summarizing process.
My class just recently watched video material about the Middle Ages and they had difficult time taking notes because of their ability to spell words right. I noticed that verbally students can summarize much better than their written response. I like the idea by taking notes in classroom and let students’ summarize their information at home.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Summarizing and Note taking is difficult for my Special Ed students. I have first taught them to find the main idea and supporting details. We have moved to note taking.
I think the students have difficulty with this because they don’t understand what they are trying to summarize. When demonstration of the deleting, substituting and keeping information in introduced and approached from the minutest approach and modeled helps them have a light bulb moment.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I find summarizing in science difficult. Many science concepts are cause and effect. End of story. My notes are normally presented in outline form: cut to the chase, eliminate words that are not necessary, such as “the”, “it”, “does” etc. Sixth graders struggle with that. They have a hard time figuring out that the A, B, C fragments indented underneat the # 1 are related to #1. Using outline form is MY idea of summarizing. The kids do finally get the drift of my method but it is always a work in progress. Learning how to outline notes that I took in classes was a large part of what got me through college.
Story telling: They love it. I do as much as I can. Every year I have a kid ask me to tell the story of my swimming pool chemicals because big brother or sister told them it to them. It’s a bang up of a story (THAT was lame!).
November 30th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Vocabulary limitations are surely a big stumbling block for our students. The substituting part of summarizing requires familiarity with the content that students may not have yet. In Marzano’s work, the science teacher substitutes “solar nebula” for “cloud of interstellar material created from previous generations of stars,” claiming they are “the same thing.” I am taking him at his word.
Mathematics has a very precise and efficient vocabulary. By design, there aren’t any substitute terms for “similar figures.” So my job seems to involve helping students compare and contrast the mathematical meaning with that of the “everyday language.”
Another hold-up is the lack of experience with the process. This is easy enough to remedy with repeated encounters. Some modeling by the teacher and sharing of good student-written summaries should help all students develop their skills to an acceptable level.
Lastly, I think the newness of the material poses a huge challenge. I think many learners, myself included, have difficulty in discerning what’s “truly important” when we encounter something very new, because as Mrs. Houston wrote, it all seems important. This is where guidance, feedback, or direct instruction from the teacher is crucial. We must help our students distinguish the “nice-to-know” from the “must-know.”
November 30th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
A lack of appropriate vocabulary looms large on the horizon as a stumbling block to effective summarizing. In Marzano’s work, the science teacher deftly substitutes “solar nebula” for “cloud of interstellar material created from previous generations of stars,” claiming they are the same thing. I take him at his word.
Mathematicians value precision and efficiency in vocabulary. My students won’t be able to find a suitable synonym for “similar figures,” because, by design, we don’t have one. My job is to help them distinguish the mathematical meaning from that of “everyday language.”
The lack of experience with the process will hamstring the students initially. This, thankfully, is easy enough to remedy. Repeated encounters with summarizing, including modeling by the teacher and sharing of good student-written summaries should help all students develop their skill to an acceptable level.
Lastly, the newness of the material poses challenges. To paraphrase Mrs. Houston, it all seems important. This is where guidance from the teacher is crucial. We must help our students differentiate between which concepts are “nice-to-know” and which are “must-know.”
December 1st, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Word problems are difficulty for special education students. Often, they are unable to determine operations needed to complete the problem. Using “summarizing” strategies of underlining important information or keeping information, drawing lines through information that is irrelevant to the finding the solution or deletion, and making substitutions (inches to yards, cm to m) gives them tools to help them focus on necessary information needed.
I encourage students to “pencil paper” in math class. This simply means for them to write the operation or process they are using to solve a problem. As examples are given in class, if they participate and take notes, solving the problem with me, they are able to transfer the knowledge when working similar problems by themselves. This note taking method allows them to look at an answer, ask themselves “is the answer is logical”, and if corrections need to be made can determine what operations or methods were used that gave them an illogical answer. I consider this as note-taking in math class.
December 3rd, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I’ll tackle the summarization question as it more applicable to my subject.
When my students first get an acting scene, they’re given a lot of information, some of it useful, some of it not. Here’s how the conversation usually goes afterwards:
Mr. Z: What is it about?
Student: Well this guy shows up and he orders a coffee and then this girl comes in and they talk.
Mr. Z: No. That’s what happens. What is it about?
Student: It’s about a guy trying to get a date.
In theatre, we tend to distill things in terms of an action verb. Who is trying to do what to whom. What is the central action of the piece? This requires editing out extraneous information by asking this question: does that piece of factual information impact the main action of the scene? If not, it’s not important that it’s sunny out or that the scene takes place on a train.
Why is it difficult for them? I agree that things are largely summarized for them. This is a fact of life in the internet age. I think it also has to do with life experience. We’ve been through so many more situations and learned so many more things, we know what to look for. We know where the important information is likely to be. These kind of clues can be taught, but it’s also a matter of “feeling” what’s important.
When I play chess, I’ll make a move based on the thousands of games I’ve played previously; I’ve made this move before and it generally led to good things, so I’ll make it this time. I don’t know necessarily that the move is a good one, I’m relying on all those previous games that are present somewhere in my mind. The kids don’t have a lot of previous games yet, so we have to help them.
December 5th, 2008 at 10:44 am
In the tech lab environment, the AES software is extremely organized and condensed. When a student team enters a new module they are immediately tasked with a pre-test and a bulleted summary of key facts. As the team works through the unit, they summarize in electronic journals where their answers are stored for scoring and future reference.
Audio-visual and multimedia presentations are in every module to provide students with a real world problem that they must solve.
Depending on the module, there are lab experiments where data is gathered, recorded, and charted in paper journals. At the end of each rotation the team’s journals, both electronic and paper, are graded. The lab does a great job of teaching students the importance of documentation and organization.
December 11th, 2008 at 11:05 am
When students summarize they often try to include every detail. When summarizing, they often find it challenging to pick the main events. By using visual aides, story maps, foldables, students are taking notes and summarizing without actually knowing they are doing it. Many hand-on “mappings” give them the skills for note taking and then writing a summary from those notes or maps.
nts.
December 13th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Summarizing is a needed life skill. It extends beyond acadamia. Unfortunately, most of the WMS students do not have a model at home that lives a life of summarizing, deleting, and keeping information. So, I feel it starts here. Then you add in that they are a different generation of children. Technology has been present in their lives since birth. It was their first toys and friends. In their early developmental years all the summarizing was done through a toy that did something for them. Please don’t think I dislike technology, the opposite is true. Like Lynn, I remember the burgandy encyclopedia’s on the bottom shelf in the living room. Now, with my oldest when he asks the question we go to the internet and look up the answer. I would hate when I would ask my Mom how to spell a word she would tell me to look it up in a dictionary. Now, I just type it and wait for the computer to tell me if I am correct. Yes, I love technology.
One last point…
Note taking was always hard for me because it was so aural. All the information came so fast and was just talk, talk, talk. It helped when their was an outline so I could organize the information quicker. I agree some kids don’t want to do all the thinking, but I do think some of the resistance can be their learning style. I know now when I attend an in-service and an outline is provided I take less notes than when I was in hs or college because I can just go to the internet and find the information again or even more.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Students find it difficult to summarize effectively because they must have the ability to analyze information at a “fairly deep level.” They must be able to use analytical thinking which is a higher-level thinking skill. We require students to memorize information which is certainly a part of the educational process. However, students must learn to use their memorized information to learn to analyze and to learn to think. They must also have solid background knowledge as a foundation for learning to analyze. Many times our students have holes in their foundation.
December 15th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
My experiences with the math enrichment students taking notes shares many of the attributes that have been mentioned as the difficulty of 12 year olds in todays world to take notes. I agree with Susan in that summarizing is difficult for these digitals immigrants for several reasons including that most information they have received their entire life is already broken down into snippets. i.e text messaging. However on the flipside this could be a tool to use in explaining the benefits of note taking since they are familiar with brief explanations.
I always tell student to write ‘this’ in your own words so that you can understand it. “As long as you know what it means”. Yet over and over they will write it word for word and not even understand because what they are copying is more information than they need or want.
As Marzano pointed out, “to effectively delete, substitute, and keep information, students must analyze the information at a fairly deep level”. Very few students who walk through my door care enough to analyze the information provided to them at a ‘fairly deep level.’ Until the attitude or outlook for math changes note taking will be a burden with very little benefits for these students. Additionally if the notes are never looked again they lose their potential to be an instructional aid.
I realize real life conversations are the way to counteract some of these obstacles. Yet it is sometimes challenging to put math in everyday conversations without getting the eye rolling and ‘oh no, not again’ looks. 12 year olds have rarely used math in everyday situations and do not see the advantages of it.
December 17th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I guess it’s hard for students and adults to summarize for 2 reasons: inexperience in choosing what is most vital to a paragraph or theme and a lack of skills in their arsenal to summarize effectively.
Bottom line, you got to develop summarizing skills. Teacher-led activities like the “rule-based” strategy — whatever strategy you want — but it’s got to be a routine, developed small to large (or basic to advanced), and it’s got to be a skill that is worked on. Teachers need to model, and model and model. There is wiggle room for individual differences but kids need to see and experience examples of summarizing. Don’t expect that they walk in the door with the skill.
Note taking vs. summarizing
They are similar because you have to choose what is most important and place it in a concise fashion, exact and to the point. I believe there are different styles of note taking out there. The difference between note taking and summarizing in my mind is how I prefer to take notes — I am all about the details and the lists of facts that make sense describing the topic. I want ALL the brief descriptors I can get my hands on in order for me to prepare for a quiz or an essay, etc. How I place the notes down on paper is a way of signifying order — headlines, bullets, underlining, etc. I believe the more notes you take (not verbatim) but the more times you add, mix, arrange your facts, the better you know your subject matter.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Summarizing is hard for students because in order to summarize something, you have to have some understanding of what you are summarizing. You have to “get it”, so to speak, on some level. If information is presented in lists of facts and has no meaning to them, they can’t internalize and summarize. Being able to summarize comes from a place of understanding information, not just repeating facts.
Note taking and summarizing are similar because both processes involve taking information and filtering out what is unnecessary to the big picture. The processes are different in that one can take notes and effectively write down ideas but not be able to summarize. Effective note taking can help students summarize better, though.