EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 7, page 141

Figure 7.5:
Common Patterns of Organization

Summarizing. Summarization involves selecting the important ideas from a text and then generating
a statement or a set of statements that captures in shortened form what the central meaning of the text is
(Dole et al., 1991). The summary of a 150-word paragraph might be a 20-word sentence. A summary of a
50-page chapter might be a 2-page outline.
Summarization is a difficult strategy for many students (Cordero-Ponce, 2000; Johnston &
Afflerbach, 1985). Good readers are better at summarizing texts than poor readers are (Winograd, 1984).
Poor readers are more likely to include less important information in their summaries, and they are more
likely than good readers to include sentences with vivid, detailed information, rather than central ideas.
Good readers are also better able to generate a good statement of what the main idea of the passage is when
the main idea isn’t explicitly stated in the text (Winograd, 1984).

Elaborating. In Chapter 2, you learned that elaboration involves connecting new information with
information from long-term memory. Students elaborate when they take the ideas that they are reading and
associate them with other things that they already know. Elaboration has positive effects on learning in that
students who elaborate learn much more than students who do not.
Ellen Gagné and her colleagues (1984) conducted a study in which they taught seventh graders the
strategy of elaboration. Students in some classes were taught to elaborate in the following way:

• John reads, “Columbus was a Spaniard. He sailed to America in 1492.” He wants to remember this
  information, so he thinks, “Columbus most likely sailed West to America because the shortest way to get
  to America from Spain is to go West.”
  Notice that John is taking information in the text and linking it with other things that he knows. In Gagné’s
  study, students who learned to elaborate showed much better text comprehension and recall than those who
  did not. Elaboration is more than just paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is saying the same ideas in the text in
  one’s own words. When a student just paraphrases what is in a text, there is relatively little old information
  being brought to bear. Elaboration goes beyond paraphrasing to make substantial connections to prior
  knowledge.

Comparing and contrasting

Main idea and details

Narrative (events in a time sequence)

Persuasion (claims and arguments)

Showing steps in a process

Research report (introduction, research questions, method, results, conclusion)