Summarizing

Summarizing as a Strategy in Learning
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Thematic units are the content that is used to structure and organize learning activities for students. They are based on the school curriculum. Through these units, learners can gain skills and information needed (Taylor, 1982). Many teachers choose these thematic units to apply to the background of the learner. Therefore they are themes according to their interests. There are many reasons as to why these units are used in a classroom setup.
First, they assist a learner with connecting with the lesson being studied. They represent the connection between the drawing and the real world. Additionally, thematic is a way of advancing the curriculum. They integrate the processing of words and instill creative skills to the learners (Meinbach et al., 2000). Also, they build classroom culture in the sense that, the students have a choice of what they are going to study. The use of collaborative learning makes the students collaborate with their teachers. Furthermore, the use of thematic themes creates a variety of lessons. Experience has shown that an all rounded student is a product of using these units. In this case, the students can be creative, authentic and in by so doing, making the learning activities fun.
For example, summarizing is a strategy that is used by teachers to discern the most important ideas in a literal text. More importantly, teachers implore the use of summary as it helps the student to discard irrelevant information.

Also, this strategy improves the memory of a student on what was read. Summarizing is done by taking note of the critical text. After this, the main ideas are jotted down, and irrelevant information is discarded. Thus, the keywords are reconstructed to form meaningful and sound sentences that illuminate the purpose of the literal text. Therefore, most teachers have come to learn that many of the students can go to all odds to escape summarizing. Besides, they believe that summary is done in writing. However, this cannot be further from the truth. In fact, summarizing can be done either orally, dramatically or artistically. Many researchers can attest to this also. Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering (2001) cites extensive research in Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Consequently, this was in a bid to prove that summarizing is among the top strategies that are effective in the history of education. As a result, the summary is used by teachers to change what the students can remember.
Unknown by many, summarizing came by due to a problem of information overload. Massive production of literal text after the renaissance increased access to information greatly. At this time in history, printing press, production of books and manuscripts came into being. Additionally, in the 20th century, improvement in technology increased information through the computers and social media (Graham and Harris, 2005). As much as this is seen as a milestone in access to information, human beings have limited cognitive processing of data. Notably, the mind tends to wander off course when it is fed large amounts of data. As such, this defines the aspects of making sound judgment and decisions. Therefore, the concept of summarizing came in handy breaking down large junks of data into critical issues that the mind can process and interpret easily (Jones, 1999). Finally, summarizing is a technique that extracts the essential information inform of concepts. It then reduces them in an essence that will illuminate on what the information was conveying.
References
Graham, S., & Harris, K. (2005). Writing Better: Effective Strategies for Teaching Students with Learning Difficulties. Brookes Publishing Company. PO Box 10624, Baltimore, MD 21285.
Jones, K. S. (1999). Automatic summarizing: factors and directions. Advances in automatic text summarization, 1-12.Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J. E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Ascd.Meinbach, A. M., Fredericks, A., & Rothlein, L. (2000). The complete guide to thematic units: Creating the integrated curriculum. Christopher-Gordon Publishers, Inc., 1502 Providence Highway, Suite 12, Norwood, MA 02062.Taylor, B. M. (1982). A summarizing strategy to improve middle grade students’ reading and writing skills. The Reading Teacher, 36(2), 202-205.