Why Main Idea is Not the Main Idea – Or, How Best to Teach Reading Comprehension

Kristen--

Perhaps... I suspect people have lots of different ideas on what gist is -- a main idea or a full blown summary? In either case, whatever it is supposed to be, asking kids to provide it won't be sufficient without explicit teaching of the steps needed to accomplish it.

tim

The focus of reading should be to derive meaning from text. So in addition to summarizing, paraphrasing, and textual analysis, it might be helpful to have children try and derive meaning from text that they have read.

It has been a long struggle for me (first as a student, then as a teacher) to express my confusion about main idea as it has been taught. You articulated well the problems with making finding the main idea a task in and if itself. As a skill, would you say identifying key words in a paragraph(s) of a text would be beneficial as components of summarizing and paragraphing?

I recommend the IES Practice Guide for grades 4-9 written by Sharon Vaughn and six others. They provide a routine for getting the 'gist' on page 47.

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/WWC/Docs/PracticeGuide/WWC-practice-guide-reading-intervention-full-text.pdf

I enjoyed your list of adjectives and the reference to reindeer and dwarves. I agree that it is easier to teach comprehension when there is something interesting, and meaningful in the text.

The curriculum we use suggests using a graphic organizer that begins with identifying the topic of what's been read, then the main idea, and then several supporting details. After that, students write a summary putting all of this together. Is this an effective way of having them write a summary, and, if not, might someone suggest a resource that provides a more effective way of having students write a summary?

I agree with you. My confusion lies in the fact that I learned how to comprehend text intuitively, without direct instruction. So all of these ideas are quite theoretical to me. I don’t understand the “how” part. What does this look like in a classroom? How do you teach these?

I agree that guided practice with lots of teacher modeling (thinking aloud about one's own analyses of a text), guided practice, paraphrasing, and text structure work , and text variety are all excellent ways to improve comprehension. Just as important is working on texts about topics that kids find intrinsically interesting. When working with struggling 3rd and 4th grade readers, I first asked the students about their interests. This led to texts about Captain Cook in Hawaii (his demise), Tom Brady, amenities on the world's largest cruise ships, the Alamo, how to avoid bears when camping, etc.

Beau--

That can work -- if there is sufficient guidance and feedback.

tim

Keralyn--

There are blogs on teaching summarizing and text structure on this site.

tim

Christine--
No, I don't think key words will help much in most cases.
tim

In your mind, what do you make of the misalignment of the Common Core standards with how children actually learn to comprehend text? Do you think it presents a flawed framework for guiding and evaluating student learning?

Secondly, as a special educator, my mind went right to IEP goals when reading this blog. What I am getting is focusing on goals that address an approach to comprehension that best aligns to how children actually learn and demonstrate comprehension--goals that address retelling, summarizing, paraphrasing and analysis of text structure. Can you provide any other guidance for developing IEP goals that are generally transferable across texts and fruitful in advancing a student's reading development? For compliance purposes, our district very strongly encourages IEP teams to select specific standards for goalsetting which can lead to focusing on instructional tasks that are inefficient in advancing student learning.

Karen-
I think the CCSS comprehension standards are fine, unless someone tries to approach them as single divisible goals (like you describe). These standards work better as a totality than as a series of singular steps. Some groups even tried to break them down eve more than this. I'd advise educators to look at these in a more sophisticated and appropriate way than the often do.

tim

I recently attended a training and the speaker said when teaching comprehension most reading curriculums have it backwards. "The Reading's instruction focus should not be spent teaching the comprehension strategies, but rather teaching background knowledge, vocabulary, and syntax using rigorous varied text. Finding the main idea, summarizing, making inferences etc... is the result of comprehending, and is the way for testing for comprehension." "Teach the strategies, but focus more on student's interacting with the text." Our current curriculum goes about teaching reading by focusing on teaching comprehension strategies. I am an Instructional coach for a K-5 Elementary and our students our strong in PA, Phonics, but as they move in upper elementary their comprehension skills are stagnant. Any direction or advice would be much appreciated.

Tim--
It's in vogue right now to claim that knowledge is pretty much all you need and you'll have high reading comprehension. Knowledge certainly plays a role in comprehension but teaching it in such a way that it improves reading comprehension is much more complicated than your speaker probably made clear -- and ignoring hundreds of studies on the teaching of strategies and language abilities and their positive impact on comprehension reveals someone who is ignoring the actual research.

tim

Upon reflecting upon this fine piece of writing, I reflected on the critical role that reading comprehension plays in the support of our democracy. Sadly, many of our fellow citizens do not have the comprehension and critical thinking skills to maintain the fabric of our democracy.

Reading is not a spectator sport when it comes to democracy. It must become more than a passive exercise to derive meaning in text. It must also be woven into a generative frame that includes writing. The reading must intertwine with the needs of the community to expand and enhance our democratic community. The great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire recognized the important interplay that reading and the community played to support a thriving democracy.

I recently wrote a commentary on EdSource called When We Fail Education, We Fail Our Democracy. I expand in greater detail that teachers and the education system play in producing highly literate citizens who can make wise choices in support of our democracy.

Dear Dr. Shanahan,
The Jack Friday like phrase "Those are the facts, ma’am.” may have been meant to be fun and casual, but it read as dismissive to women. I am sure that was not your intention. With respect and gratitude for your work. Please keep the advice coming.
Mary BH

I agree with everything you've written. I think the issue is that teachers are held accountable through testing to teach main idea comprehension in this isolated way. Many schools require it as part of their curriculum. How would you respond to a teacher in that situation?

@Kristen, Here is EL Education's use of that. https://eleducation.org/resources/gist-vs-main-idea/
But I can quickly find plenty of other places where they use them interchangeably.
I'd go with EL's definition, and not worry too much--for all the reasons Tim mentions! :-)

Jennifer--
If you want kids to do better on a main idea test or on the main idea items in a test, teach students how to use text structure, summarize, and paraphrase -- don't worry so much about main idea. Use challenging texts and hold the kids accountable for gaining the information from the text. Your kids will do better.

tim

Hi Tim, great and useful information as always. I would be curious what you suggest in terms of teaching students oral language skills. We know that students just learning to read can pick up a lot through read alouds, and much of this transfers over into reading/writing when their print skills develop more. However, I rarely see systematic, structured oral language programs or methods being discussed around the topic of comprehension. Rather, people are seeming to swing more into feeding kids knowledge building curriculum early on in their learning, despite not having much evidence in how to best implement that in a developmentally appropriate way. However, there does seem to be ways to teach and embed things like vocabulary/background knowledge in even simple narrative discourse and stories that seem more appropriate for our youngest learners and which teachers may feel they can do on their own effectively, but I have yet to see this as the case. Any thoughts you can give on this would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Tim,
I teach basic text structures and summarizing in my first grade classroom, but haven't thought of paraphrasing. Would it be too early to do that? If so, how would I differentiate the two ideas (summarizing vs. paraphrasing) for first graders?

Jill--
Paraphrasing often is summarizing but not always. Basically, you are trying to say what someone else has said, but in your own words -- which has a tendency to shorten things a bit (hence, the summary).
For instance,
James went to the traveling circus last week with my friends, Aimee, Billy, and Mary.
This might be paraphrased: James and his friends went to the circus recently.

tim

Frank--
With younger kids, oral language development is important, but by the time kids are in grade 2, the emphasis should have shifted to written language (which is more demanding than oral and more closely related to reading). For written language, I have blogs on this site about sentence comprehension, vocabulary, morphology, text structure, and cohesion. In terms of younger kids, reading to the children, lots of opportunity for discussion, vocabulary teaching, extending student talk (by helping them expand their utterances), etc.

tim

This topic of main idea, whether it should be taught, and how it should be taught is something I have focused on for over 40 years, so this is going to be a long response. Thanks, Tim, for emphasizing in your post that simply asking questions about main ideas is not teaching comprehension. I wish you would have offered more detail about how to do this.

You make a good point that there are many labels associated with main idea (getting the gist, central idea, topic). Regardless of what you call it, the ability to distinguish the big idea from related, supporting details is essential to making meaning while reading. And this does not come naturally to many students. They need explicit instruction about this with lots of guided practice using different types of text, about different topics, in different subjects before they can apply this critical thinking skill as part of their reading comprehension repertoire. And that’s another important point: identifying main ideas while reading should be part of multiple strategies students use at the same time, which is why it should be part of close reading instruction and not taught as an isolated skill.

First, it’s important to emphasize that recognizing the big idea vs supporting details is an important skill/strategy to support comprehension. There are some folks in our field who, in their attempt to promote development of knowledge in place of comprehension strategy instruction as the solution to improving reading comprehension, often use “finding the main idea” as the example of something we should dispense with. Research supports explicit comprehension instruction, including main idea instruction. Klingner and Vaughn’s Collaborative Strategic Reading (Getting the Gist) and Palinscar and Brown’s Reciprocal Teaching (main ideas as part of summarizing) come to mind. And it is one of recommendations in the recent IES Practice Guide for intervention in 4-9.

How do we explicitly teach students to identify main ideas while reading and state thoem in their own words? As noted in the IES guide, teaching a routine for the critical thinking process of finding the main idea is helpful. Beginnin with my work LD students at Landmark School in the 80’s and 90’s, and over the past 20 years providing literacy PD to teachers through Keys to Literacy, , I find it is helpful to teach students to identify essential details and then determine what they have in common. For example, if a paragraph has several detail sentences describing the different types of nests built by birds, then the main idea would be something like “different birds build different types of nests”. This is similar to Klingner and Vaughn’s suggestion to “identify the most important person, place or thing in a paragraph and then state the most important idea about the person, place, or thing”. There are some additional “techniques” we teach students such as “Label the Bucket” and “Goldilocks” designed to support their critical evaluation of the text.

It is also helpful to recognize that main idea can be taught along a scope and sequence, moving from simple to more complex application. This begins with categorizing items or words, then paragraph main ideas where a topic sentence is available and then where it is implied and not stated, then central ideas of multi-paragraphs.

Main idea instruction should be integrated with the application of other comprehension strategies, such as summarizing, paraphrasing to help students state main ideas in their own words, and note taking where students jot down main ideas and key details

Finally, I agree with Tim’s point that texts often used for main idea practice are “vapid, sapid, and wasteful”. This is often a result of trying to teach main idea as an isolated skill rather than providing instruction and guided practice during subject instruction using real text. As I noted at the start, main idea instruction and guided practice needs to be integrated with other close reading and comprehension strategy instruction using real text, taught by teachers of all subjects who use a consistent approach and terminology for that instruction.

My then 7th grade dyslexic son's class in an elite dyslexia school read this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/us/21artist.html in a "Newsela" version. When the teacher asked what kind of writing project they should do hoping to elicit the "document based query", instead heard from my son that they should write the incarcerated person a letter. Other children were astounded as "prisoners don't deserve letters" and a rich discussion ensued. To try to get the class back, the teacher asked what the article was about. One kid said prison, a second kid said art and my kid said "redemption".

I get confused with the emphasis on building background knowledge and using texts 2 years above grade level when teaching Reading (comprehension). Actually it seems we are teaching or measuring listening comprehension. My kids are really great about listening to my read alouds, discussing them, and making connections. However this knowledge does not transfer to assessments because everything in the classroom has been read to them. We've missed the important part of actually teaching reading skills (how to read) and my kids are on average 2 years below where they should be in reading ability. So, while they are 2 years below grade level, I'm reading books 2 years above grade level, and on independent assessments (both universal screeners, phonics assessments, and written Reading tests) my students simply can't transfer the knowledge. Can you speak to this idea about Listening Comprehension versus Reading Comprehension? Wouldn't Reading Comprehension only be if students are actually able to read the text?

Amy--

Why would you teach students with textbook two grades above level? That makes no sense. Reading comprehension requires, well, reading. Reading it to the kids might do you some good, but it won't help their reading comprehension. I have written about listening comprehension versus reading comprehension on this site (look up listening comprehension). Reading the texts to the students is not a good way to go. There are blog entries and publications on teaching with complex text-- get back to grade level and try some of those instructional moves.

tim