Learning requires students to understand concepts on at least a surface level. Deeper learning requires students to be able to make connections among concepts they understand. Mastery learning takes place when students can use their understandings and the connections they’ve made to transfer their learning to real-life scenarios.
Once we’ve done the usual steps – sharing content and activities and labs – and are ready to ask students to show what they know, it’s time for students to do some serious processing. Enter summarization.
Summarization is a powerful tool for learning. Traditional summarization techniques include reading or listening to informational content and reducing it to key points. The key points are then connected to related learning, both current and past. Finally, the learning is transferred to the real world, as a scenario or example.
The process I’ve used helps students efficiently and effectively understand and retain their learning. As our study of a concept culminates, we use these steps to make a summary sheet:
- Collect terms and concepts
- Word vomit (AKA brainstorm) alone. List all related words you can think of
- Review your list with a partner – ask questions
- Leaf through your notes and add any terms still missing
- Organize and connect terms and concepts
- into lists, lists of steps
- labeled diagrams
- charts, graphs
- concept maps
- Venn diagrams
- This is the hardest part for students. You will likely have to teach how to do this and give examples.
- Transfer and apply
- Make the final summary sheet as if you were going to use this as a “cheat sheet” on an assessment. One side of an 8.5 X 11″ paper, so students must carefully consider what’s most important.
- Take the assessment
- Review the corrected assessment and evaluate errors, misconceptions
- Revise your summary sheet
- Reflect, revise, evaluate
- Take the assessment a second time
- Revise or re-write your summary sheet.
To teach the process, start with a single concept that connects to others. have students focus first on the simple concept and a short quiz – 5-10 questions – so they don’t feel overwhelmed. As they learn to embrace the process, it can be used as review for a unit test or semester exam.
Overall, summarization is a powerful tool for learning as it allows individuals to quickly and effectively understand and retain important information.
The instructional document my students use is available for you to modify and use with your students, too. Summarization to Prepare for an Assessment
Let me know what you think in the comments below, or shoot me an email:
Luann at makingsciencereal.com