A Short Term Tutoring Program: Summarizing Chemistry Text with Grade 12 Gifted Students

Abstract

The ability to summarize content area text becomes increasingly important as the reading demands on students increase. Often it is assumed that by high school students are skilled at reducing a passage to its gist. A Canadian teacher discovered, however, that the summaries of his academically gifted high school students taking a university level chemistry course were a retelling of the original text. Together with a university researcher a short term tutoring project was offered to assist students in developing their summarization skills. The sessions involved ’think alouds’ and direct explicit instruction of the strategies followed by practice time and student refl ection. The fi ndings of the study revealed that while the students quickly learned the specifi c steps of the two summarization methods, more time and additional practice were required for autonomous application of these strategies by students. Further, even high achieving students needed to personally buy-in to the benefi ts of a new strategy.