Using Paraphrasing and Text Structure Instruction to Support Main Idea Generation

The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students’ reading comprehension (i.e., readers in Grades 4 through 12; Kamil et al., 2008). Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most important information, and put that information into their own words. Stopping to identify the most important information after reading a brief section of text supports monitoring for understanding. It also helps students to remember the key information and to integrate that information across longer sections of text. As a result, generating main ideas is an important subskill for summary writing and helps students understand and learn from text (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978).