11 Preparing to Summarize
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the title, author, topic, major supporting points, and thesis when reading an article to summarize it.
- Write the major supporting points and thesis in your own words.
This chapter provides an opportunity for you to apply what you have learned in the previous chapter about summarizing.
Apply the Reading Process
Before you begin the summary process, you should always use the reading process presented earlier in the text to preview, read, and reflect on the article. As part of your preview process, consider your own experience as it relates to the topic of the article. Examples of previewing and reading interactively were presented earlier in the text for an article originally published by the nonprofit, independent news organization, The Conversation. This article examines students’ identities as either “reading people” or “math people.”
Before proceeding, print a copy of the article below so that you can mark the text and make notes on it. Click here for a printable PDF.
Students perceive themselves as a ‘math person’ or a ‘reading person’ early on – and this can impact the choices they make throughout their lives
Sirui Wan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
1 As kids progress through school, they tend to increasingly perceive themselves as either a “math person” or a “language person,” even if they’re good at both, according to a recent study I led.
2 My colleagues and I were interested in why people pursue specific educational and career trajectories – like choosing a science, technology, engineering and mathematics major vs. a non-STEM major in college. We know that having a specific academic identity, like considering oneself a “math person,” is one of the reasons people choose a corresponding career path. My team wanted to find out when some kids start to lean toward identifying this way.
3 We focused on math and language arts because they are the most common subjects in the U.S. K-12 system; for example, the SAT has two main sections: English and math. There is also a gender stereotype that reading is for girls and math is for boys.
4 My team analyzed data involving 142 independent samples across the world, featuring almost 211,000 students from 16 countries and regions. This data includes self-reported confidence and interest in math and language arts from students in different grades.
5 Our research indicates an age-related change in kids’ academic identity formation.
6 We found that during primary school, students who reported high confidence and interest in language arts were also likely to report high confidence and interest in math. But as students progress though the school years, this pattern gradually changes. In high school, students who reported high confidence and interest in language arts reported lower confidence and interest, on average, in math, and vice versa.
7 In other words, students become more likely to think that they’re either a math person or a reading person as they progress through their school years.
Why it matters
8 Students choose to pursue a specific career path for various reasons. One of the most common is that they believe they are good at doing a task. Our research suggests that some students develop a misconception that they can only be either a math or a reading person as they move from primary to secondary school.
9 This misconception can have a dark side: Students might disengage from subjects that they perceive as their relative weaknesses even when they are actually good at these subjects relative to other students.
10 An example is that many students, especially girls, perform very well in math but do even better in verbal domains. These students might view math as a relative weakness and avoid pursuing math-related educational and career paths.
11 In other words, the misconception found in our study can lead some students to miss out on educational opportunities.
What still isn’t known
12 Although viewing oneself as better in one domain than another likely carries costs, it may have benefits as well. It would be useful to understand these before our team can make strong recommendations to parents, teachers or policymakers for interventions.
13 Additionally, to support each student’s unique journey, parents, teachers and schools would benefit from a stronger understanding of how students come to think that one can only be good at either math or reading. Unfortunately, we still know little about the impact of contributing factors, such as the school environment.
14 A potential contributing factor that we considered in our study is tracking, or schools dividing students into groups by their perceived achievement. Our study found that German students tend to believe they are good at only one of the two domains slightly earlier than U.S. students do, perhaps because academic tracking starts earlier in Germany than in the U.S..
15 Studying the implications of different educational practices on students’ academic beliefs is a line of research that my colleagues and I are currently pursuing.
Sirui Wan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Gathering the Information for the Summary
After using the reading process to preview, read, and reflect, reread the article to summarize. This might seem unnecessary. However, you read the article the first time to familiarize yourself with the content. Summarizing requires a more detailed examination of the text to understand the relationship between the ideas: which are major points, which are minor details, and how all the major points are connected.
When summarizing, you are reading for a different purpose; your goal is to search for the main ideas, sift out the details, and express the main ideas in your own words.
Taking Notes to Summarize
- Download and print the Summary Notes document. If you do not have a printer, download the file and follow the format to record the notes on a piece of paper.Record the title and author(s) of the text on the document.
- Based on what you learned while applying the reading process, express the topic in a word or phrase.
- As you reread, pause to write the major supporting point or main idea from each paragraph or section in your own words. Writing an idea in your own words is called paraphrasing. Sometimes, a single paragraph may have its own major supporting point; however, if the paragraphs are short, consider grouping related paragraphs together to determine the major point.
- Determine the thesis, or overall main idea, of the text. This should be the central point about the topic. The major supporting points should relate to the thesis.
Practice: Complete the Summary Notes
Use the Summary Notes document to record the information needed to summarize the article about math people and reading people.
Compare your Summary Notes to the ones below. Make sure your ideas agree. The topic, major supporting points, and thesis should be written in your own words, but the content should be the same as what is included in the example.
Summary Notes – Example
*Student responses are written in blue.*
Title of the reading
“Students Perceive Themselves As a ‘Math Person’ or a ‘Reading Person’ Early on – and This Can Impact the Choices They Make throughout Their Lives”
Author(s) of the reading
Sirui Wan
Topic of the reading (topic = the person, place, event, or idea that the article is about; express as word or phrase)
math, reading, and student identity
NOTE ~ There are many ways to state the topic. Other possibilities include:
- identity as a math or reading person
- self perception as a math or reading person
- math, reading, and self-perception
Major supporting points in the reading (major support = paragraph-level and section-level main ideas; express in complete sentences; paraphrase all ideas; label points with paragraph numbers)
Paragraphs 1-2: Researchers investigated when students start to identify as either “math people” or “reading people.”
Paragraph 3: They chose math and reading because they are commonly taught and because girls are often stereotyped as readers and boys as math people.
Paragraph 4-7: The researchers examined data from over 200,000 students around the world and concluded that students are more likely to view themselves as either math or reading people as they advance through school, even if they liked or believed they were skilled in both areas in elementary school.
Paragraphs 8-11: When students see themselves as one or the other, they may avoid what they perceive as their weaker subject area in school and not consider related career paths.
Paragraphs 12-15: The author wants to know if there may be benefits to identifying as one type, either math or reading, and to understand the variables that contribute to students’ misperceptions, such as whether or not schools track students into certain subjects.
Thesis of the reading (What is the main point the author is telling us about the topic? What is the overall main idea of the text?)
Researchers learned that students increasingly view themselves as either “math people” or “reading people,” and this can impact their academic and career decisions.
It may also be helpful to write your points directly on the article itself, as show in the following example: Summary Annotations.
If needed, revisit the article to reread and clarify any points. In the next chapter, you will learn how to use your notes to write a one-paragraph summary.