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Summarizing and Synthesizing: Whats the Difference?

Summarizing and synthesizing are two important reading comprehension strategies. Theyre also skills that students struggle with and often confuse despite the differences. In this article, we review the two skills, discuss the differences between them, and highlight activities that can be used to support students as they develop proficiency with them.

SUMMARIZING
What does summarizing mean? Into the Book, a reading strategies web site for teachers and students, explains that when readers summarize, they identify key elements and condense important information into their own words during and after reading to solidify meaning. The site offers a simpler definition for students: Tell whats important. Why is summarizing difficult for students? For starters, it requires students to apply the skill of determining importance in text and then express the important ideas in their own words. Many times, as students learn to summarize, their first attempts are a collection of details, rather than the main ideas of the passage. Other student-produced summaries are too vague and do not include enough detail. Teachers need to devote time to explicit instruction and modeling on both determining importance and summarizing to help students become proficient with both strategies.

The following resources can be helpful for teaching students to summarize: Summarizing This article provides an overview of summarizing as a reading comprehension strategy, and how it can be taught and assessed in an elementary classroom. Into the Book: Summarizing This section of the Into the Book web site provides definitions of summarizing for teachers and students, learning objectives with videos, lessons, and a wealth of additional resources. The student area (which requires a key to access) has interactive activities for each of the featured comprehension strategies. Guided Comprehension: Summarizing Using the QuIP Strategy This lesson plan, for grades 3-6 from ReadWriteThink, teaches students to summarize information by graphically organizing information in response to questions, then reorganizing their answers into paragraph form. Lesson 8: Summarizing Information In this lesson, students practice summarizing by extracting the Five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and the H (how) from feature stories in local newspapers. The lesson could be adapted for use with other texts as well.

SYNTHESIZING
Synthesizing takes the process of summarizing one step further. Instead of just restating the important points from text, synthesizing involves combining ideas and allowing an evolving understanding of text. Into the Book defines synthesizing as [creating] original insights, perspectives, and understandings by reflecting on text(s) and merging elements from text and existing schema. For students, the site provides the simpler Put pieces together to see them in a new way. As with summarizing, this higher-order thinking skill needs explicit instruction and modeling. In her book Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading, Tanny McGregor provides examples of instructional sequences for synthesizing using common objects (nesting dolls), prompts or sentence starters, and a spiral-shaped graphic organizer inspired by the notes written and passed by her students. These activities provide the scaffolding needed to support students as they become familiar and then proficient with the skill and can be used with all types of text. The following resources can be helpful for teaching students to synthesize: Synthesizing This article provides an overview of synthesizing as a reading comprehension strategy and describes approaches for teaching and supporting students as they develop proficiency. Into the Book: Synthesizing This section of the Into the Book web site provides definitions of synthesizing for teachers and students, learning objectives with videos, lessons, and a wealth of additional resources.

The student area (which requires a key to access) has interactive activities for each of the featured comprehension strategies. Classroom Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading Tanny McGregors book includes chapters devoted to six reading comprehension strategies: schema, inferring, questioning, determining importance, visualizing, and synthesizing. Heinemanns page also includes links to web seminars about various strategies (click on Companion Resources).

This article was written by Jessica Fries-Gaither. For more information, see the Contributors page. Email Jessica at beyondpenguins@msteacher.org. Copyright June 2010 The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0733024. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license.

One thought on Summarizing and Synthesizing: Whats the Difference?

1.

Julie on January 1, 2013 at 9:08 pm said: Can you please include an example of synthesizing? Thanks. Reply

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Synthesis
A synthesis is a combination, usually a shortened version, of several texts made into one. It contains the important points in the text and is written in your own words. To make a synthesis you need to find suitable sources, and then to select the relevant parts in those sources. You will then use your paraphrase and summary skills to write the information in your own words. The information from all the sources has to fit together into one continuous text. Please remember, though, that when you synthesise work from different people, you must acknowledge it. See Citation. The following stages may be useful: 1. Find texts that are suitable for your assignment. 2. Read and understand the texts. 3. Find the relevant ideas in the texts. Mark them in some way - write them down, take notes, underline them or highlight them. 4. Make sure you identify the meaning relationships between the words/ideas - use colours or numbers. 5. Read what you have marked very carefully. 6. Organise the information you have. You could give all similar ideas in different texts the same number or letter or colour. 7. Transfer all the information on to one piece of paper. Write down all simiar information together. 8. Paraphrase and summarise as necessary. 9. Check your notes with your original texts for accuracy and relevance. 10. Combine your notes into one continuous text. 11. Check your work. a. Make sure your purpose is clear

b. Make sure the language is correct c. Make sure the style is your own d. Remember to acknowledge other people's work