Strategies for Helping Readers

Check for Understanding

Employing a variety of techniques to ensure effective comprehension. Skilled readers check comprehension by stopping periodically and reflecting on their understanding. This reflection can include confirming that the purpose(s) for reading is being, or has been met. Summarization, retelling, and paraphrasing are often used as specific techniques.

Watch a Video About This Strategy

Video Link

Suzanne Clewell

"Summarizing for a middle school student is something that every student should be able to do, and it's different from retelling. At the primary grades we often see first and second graders retelling a story where they tell every little detail of Little Red Riding Hood or whatever tale they might be reading."

"Yet when students get into middle school and high school we expect them to be able to tell the gist or the most important information starting from the topic and then thinking about ideas that are related to that topic. The best way that we can teach summarizing is to be able to ask what's it all about and then to think about what are those big ideas that support what’s it all about."

"Students generally like to summarize. They like to be able to tell what it is that they think's important, and even if they might come up with that memorable detail or that gory little sentence that was in the text it's one way to help them focus as to what's important."

When Can It Be Used?

During and after reading.

What You Can Do to Support This Strategy:

Find out more about teaching students to paraphrase.

Use story retelling - instead of answering questions - as a way to check for understanding. You can give students this checklist to help themselves prepare to retell a story.

Help students develop their ability to summarize the information they find in a text. Use this checklist to help students understand what goes into a summary, based on the structure of the text.

Assess use of this strategy by observing pauses in reading that may indicate an attempt to reflect or process a portion of text.

Find Out More

After Reading: Strategies for Reconstructing and Extending Meaning, an excerpt from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) handbook., offers ways to encourage effective retelling and summarizing.