Processing and Summarize the Learning

Students must be given the opportunity to process and summarize new information. There are so many ways to do this. When we think of summarizing we automatically think essay or book report. While there is a place for these things, it is important that the students are just regurgitating information. The task given should take them beyond the first level of Bloom's. In order for students to retain the information they must internalize it.

The old standard jigsaw works really well with this. The students have to understand their part of the assignment and teach it to the rest of their group.

One of my favorite vocabulary activities that I assigned my students for vocabulary is to assign them one or two words a day. Before the next day at that same time they must use the assigned word in a conversation at least three times. They would write down who they were talking to, the sentence that spoke the word in, and what the conversation was about.

Another activity I used to assign when I was teaching science, this can be used as either a front loading activity or a review activity. I'd assign each of the students a very small section of the text (sometimes it would be just one paragraph, other times it would all of a particular subheading) and have them become an expert on their assigned section. Then they would make a poster to teach the rest of the class about their section.

A student can memorize almost anything, but to truly understand the information and retain it for any length of time, the students must have time to process and summarize the information.