Podcast Transcript
Questions about the best summary of a passage ask you about the main points of the passage. When you answer questions about summary, first ask yourself, What is the main idea of the passage? A good summary is closer to the main idea than to any single detail found in the passage.
In the previous episode, we focused on the eleventh reading strategy – Interpreting Figurative Language.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Summarising, which is one of the higher-order reading strategies that caps off the later levels of CARS & STARS Online.
But what are reading strategies, and why should you know about them?
Learning to read can be a difficult task, but teaching someone to read can be another thing entirely. Learning to decode letters and sound out words are one thing, but neither skill really assists in the most important aspect of reading – that of comprehending what one reads, of being able to understand what something is saying rather than just being able to read it as text.
Understanding text in this way has often been something students have been expected to just pick up on their own – or something that will develop as the ability to decode the text on a literal level does. One reason why this might be the case is because understanding is such a nebulous concept – we can tell students can read something if they can read it to us, but we can only really determine whether they understand it fully with some much more in-depth work.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension.
The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike.
The twelve reading strategies progress from simpler, lower-order thinking skills such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details to more complex, higher-order concepts such as Identifying Author’s Purpose and Summarising. Initial questions determine students’ mastery of the text at a literal level, while later questions build on this understanding to get to the heart of their conceptual understanding. In this way, in every reading passage across every reading level, students are being asked to perform the same essential tasks – with their difficulty and complexity increasing as the student progresses through the reading levels.
These research-proven strategies, taken together, offer a complete recipe for increased student awareness of textual features and concepts, and provide a direct and understandable pathway to improving reading comprehension for every student.
And now, onto our main strategy for this episode: Summarising!
A good summary of a text involves relating the most important parts of it without straying into extraneous facts or details.
Summarising moves beyond simply Finding the Main Idea – the first of the 12 main reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online – to being able to describe the most important points that contribute to it. A summary doesn’t just recount the main events, it shows the relationship between details and the main idea, illustrating an ability to separate important details from supporting ones.
A student who can accurately summarise a text has not only demonstrated that they completely understand it, but that they do so at such a developed level that they can boil it down to its most important component parts and communicate that to others.
Summarising involves having complete command over every detail in a text and being able to determine which are most important and which are merely offering subsidiary information. In this way, summarising encapsulates most if not all of the abilities and skills demonstrated in highly developed reading comprehension.
Summarising is the last of the twelve main reading strategies that underpin the CARS & STARS Online reading comprehension program. Demonstrating the ability to summarise an entire text shows that a student has understood it at a high level, but also illustrates that they are not distracted by what is not important within it and can distil their understanding to its most essential parts.
Summarising involves not just relating the most important details of a text, but being able to sum it up in a way that goes to the heart of what it is about. Summarising comes last in the twelve main reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online because in summing up a text a student is building on the knowledge they have demonstrated across the other eleven reading strategies up until that point. In this way they are not just summarising the story they have read but also their own understanding of it.
The ability to summarise information in this way is an important life skill that allows readers to demonstrate understanding without waffling or getting bogged down in unimportant details. This is the heart of reading comprehension and being an informed and selective consumer of media, be it for news or entertainment.
Here are some tips for using the strategy of Summarising with any text.
If you are reading fiction, look for the main character’s problem and the solution.
If you are reading nonfiction, look for the main ideas of the selection.
In one sentence, retell the most important ideas.
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at using Summarising with a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read this text about dragons.
Stories about dragons are popular all around the world. According to the ancient Greeks, the god Apollo killed a dragon called Python. All British schoolchildren know the story of St George. He rescued a princess by using his lance to kill a dragon. In India, people tell a story about a dragon that held within him all the world’s water.
In some cultures, dragons are fierce and fire-breathing. However, to the Chinese, a dragon is a symbol of good luck and wealth. This is why every Chinese New Year parade includes a group of people wearing a large dragon costume as they wind through neighbourhood streets.
What is the main idea of the text?
Is it:
Stories about dragons are popular all around the world.
Everyone enjoys seeing the dragon at a Chinese New Year parade.
Dragon stories in Great Britain are different from dragon stories in Greece.
Or: People in India tell about a dragon who held all the world’s water.
The correct answer is: Stories about dragons are popular all around the world.
This answer is correct because it tells what the article is mostly about. The main idea is stated in the first sentence. The other facts and details in the article support this main idea.
Now, what is the best summary of the article?
Is it:
A costumed dragon is everyone’s favourite part of a Chinese New Year parade.
Some dragons are friendly, but others are mean and fire-breathing.
In China, a dragon is a symbol of good luck and wealth.
Or: Although they vary from country to country, stories about dragons are told all over the world.
The answer is: Although they vary from country to country, stories about dragons are told all over the world.
This answer is correct because it contains the main ideas from the whole text. A good summary of nonfiction includes the main idea or ideas of the article.
Summarising is featured in levels D to H of CARS & STARS Online, because it’s a higher-order thinking skill. But as you can see, it builds on lower-order strategies such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details, and so in a way the groundwork for it is present throughout the entirety of the program.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program where students move through five Pre-tests, five Benchmarks and five Post Tests at every level, building mastery of reading comprehension through multiple-choice questions targeting 12 core reading strategies.
Not too long ago, the idea of a program like this would have conjured up images of specialist software running on very particular computer hardware that all had to be the same. Perhaps you would only have been able to use this software in a computer room full of enormous, boxy towers that dwarfed the students sitting in front of them. Only the most well-off of schools would be able to afford the investment, and those that did would have to make sure that all their computers were the same and had adequate technical specifications to run the software. Even so, the program would doubtless require IT skills beyond that of many English teachers to administer. Something designed to make reading instruction easier would necessitate hours of tech support and developing new-found expertise in solving student’s computer problems.
Thankfully, the twenty-first century has moved software out of the realms of the computer laboratory and into the pockets of everyone, with accessibility and ease of use being the central goal. CARS & STARS Online is no different.
CARS & STARS Online requires no special computer hardware to operate. It works on any device with an internet capability, and so is compatible with all types of computer, tablet or smartphone that can connect to the internet. Users can even start an exercise on one device, then login on another and pick it up exactly where they left off. The program requires no further hardware investment for specialist equipment, and there’s no requirement that every student – or teacher, for that matter – has the same type of device.
The program contains an adjustable user experience, so that users with older devices can disable certain interface features to ensure that the software runs well on slower machines. But doing this does not change anything fundamental to the program – every user gets the same content and answers the same questions. They all get the same benefit from the digital experience.
CARS & STARS Online is designed to work on any type of device, anywhere, with just an internet connection. It makes digital reading comprehension accessible and easy for all.
This concludes the last of the 12 main reading strategies that underpin the CARS & STARS Online program.
Thanks for listening!
