“Tell me the important information the writer tells about Chester Greenwood,” I asked 3rd student, Thomas*, after our study of the book Chester Greenwood’s Big Idea by Christine A. Economos. Economos’ book recounts the story of the inventor of the earmuffs and in a narrative style describes the process he went through to invent the earmuffs.

“He had big ears and he lived long ago in a small town,” replied Thomas with utmost seriousness. When asked if there was any more important information to remember he carefully paged through the book and answered, “He liked to skate.”

While these details added to the overall understanding of the book, they were merely that- just details. Why did this 3rd grader choose those 3 details to tell me when asked to retell the important information in the book? Why did he choose to leave out the invention of the earmuffs which was central to the entire story?

These are questions I have asked myself numerous times when working with young readers. Many children seem to miss the forest for the trees as the old expression goes. They get caught up in the details and miss the main message of the book they are reading. Helping children to recognize what is most important to remember from a book or piece of text seemed to be a logical next step in our strategy instruction.

Fourth grade teachers began a non-fiction unit at the beginning of our work on determining importance. Non-fiction is often the genre kids struggle with the most, especially when asked to determine which parts of the book are important and which are interesting details. We decided it was crucial to give students very practical, tangible strategies they could use to decide what parts of the text are more important than others.

Looking For Ideas that Repeat

One strategy we taught children to help them determine importance is to look for words or ideas that repeat. This required some teaching and modeling first as not every word that repeats is actually important. The word, the, for example, is repeated countless times in books but is not going to help signal importance. Also, some words might be different but the idea is the same which would be an example of something the repeats. Using some type of recording page, such as the one pictured on the right, can help children track the ideas that repeat and can allow them to analyze those repeating ideas when determining ideas that are important in the text.

If Thomas had recorded words or ideas that repeated when reading about Chester Greenwood, he would have noticed words like earmuffs, invention, and cold repeated often. Analyzing those repeating ideas would have helped Thomas to pull out the ideas that were important in the book.

Text Features

Another strategy we taught to the students was to use various text features as clues to what the author may believe is important. Headings, pictures, bolded words, and various other text features can signal importance. Authors use these features to help draw their reader into the important ideas. Helping students to recognize these text features can also help them to notice which ideas are important.

There were many text features in the book that Thomas had read. Various pictures and headings throughout the book provided clear clues as to what information is important.

Important Information vs. Interesting Details

A final strategy we taught in order to help students determine importance in text was differentiating between important information and interesting details. Just because a child finds a detail interesting, does not necessarily make it important to the overall message or theme of the book. Thomas, for example, found it interesting that Chester Greenwood had big ears. While this detail helped support the explanation of his invention of earmuffs, it wasn’t essential to the book. This strategy required some scaffolding. First we chose facts from the book we were reading and students had to decide if the fact was a piece of important information or just an interesting detail. This was quite difficult for the students as they seemed to think that every piece of information in a book must be important. Referring to the previous strategy of looking for ideas that repeat helped the children to determine if a detail was important information to the overall message of the book or merely a detail that helped support or provide interest in the topic.

We are eager to administer the post assessment for this strategy to see student growth. On the pre- assessment, students were unable to identify any clear strategies for determining importance in text. Responses included phrases such as, “I think really hard about it” or “All things in books are important” which clearly showed the inability of students to differentiate between important information and interesting details. We are hopeful that students now have more concrete strategies to use when determining importance and can apply those strategies to their independent reading.

It has been a long time since I have posted on the progress of our research project. The delay is partly due to lack of progress. As all teachers, we have found ourselves bogged down by the demands of the job. Sickness and snow days have impacted our ability to collaborate and plan. Curricular demands have delayed the administration of pre and post assessments. And the teaching of metacognition and thinking strategies has felt a bit clunky. Our reading curriculum, developed by National Heritage Academies in Grand Rapids, MI, correlates well with common core standards. But the length of the lessons, the frequency of required assessments, and the sheer volume of content has made strategy instruction challenging. While thinking strategies are the big umbrellas underneath which the standards lie, the reality of meshing that instruction with standards and skills based instruction has proven to be challenging.

Despite all of these obstacles, we are happy to report growth. At the beginning of our strategy instruction we gave a pre assessment on both thinking aloud and monitoring for meaning. The students showed growth in both areas. On the thinking aloud assessment, the students grew from an average score of 2.0 (out of a 5 point scale) to a 2.5. On the monitoring for meaning assessment the students grew from an average score of 2.3 to a score of 2.5.

We observed that students improved in their ability to think about what they are reading and connect it to their own lives. We also observed that students seemed more aware of difficulties they experienced when reading text. However, we noticed that students continued to have difficulty naming specific things they could do to problem solve when experiencing difficulty and we noticed that while their thinking improved, it often was lacking in depth.

Moving forward we are going to be even more explicit in our instruction of strategies than we have been in the past. The strategy we are currently teaching is Determining Importance. We are working on not only modeling the strategy through thinking aloud, but also helping the students apply it to their independent reading in very concrete ways. We are eager to see our students’ thinking continue to deepen.