What Significant Problem of Practice did Your Intervention Target?
Problem: Students are having trouble summarizing texts. We define texts broadly to include written texts along with audio and visual texts. Students tend to focus on smaller details rather than large points which causes them to misinterpret the author’s purpose. Students also tend to focus only on the first few pages when reading large works.
We chose this problem because we all have observed students struggling to understand the major concepts in the texts they are reading. Further, we agreed that students will be more likely to succeed in all of their college classes if they have clear strategies to use in order to comprehend texts when reading them. Specifically, if students can more accurately understand, and summarize, what they are reading in any college course, then it is more likely that they will succeed in each individual class because they will more correctly understand the course material. Ultimately, learning this skill in high school will help make a smoother transition to college, and reinforcing this skill set in college will help students better apply this skill set in a more independent fast-paced college environment.
What Common Core State Standards Relate to this Problem and How?
Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
RI 11-12.4 Determine the meaning of symbols, key terms, and other domain-specific words and phrases as they are used in a specific scientific or technical context relevant to grades
RI 11-12.7 Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.
WPA Outcome Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to the interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and to how these features function for different audiences and situations
