In this post, we’ll take a deeper look at the importance of summarizing as a demonstration of reading comprehension. Additionally, we’ll examine the progression of this skill across elementary, middle, and high school grade levels.
Summarizing is the ability to answer the question, “What is the text about?” A strong summary showcases the important information of a story and filters out the unimportant details. Most summaries answer the “5Ws and 1H” rule of writing: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? In its most simple form, summarizing is the ability to distill the most important parts of a piece of writing.
Download a summarizing activity for students in Grades 4 and beyond.
A reader’s ability to summarize highlights their complete understanding of a text. If a reader can note the important information that is explicit in a text (such as the who or the characters) as well as infer the implicit information in a text (such as the why or the motivation of characters), it is a sign of not understanding and misinterpretation of the text.