Teaching High School Students to Identify Main Ideas in Expository Text

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Abstract
Systematic main idea instruction was delivered to minority high school students in four 75-minute lessons patterned upon suggestions from the instructional literature. A counterpart control group received instruction in vocabulary development. Results indicated that students who received main idea instruction were significantly better at identifying explicit and implicit main ideas in paragraphs, at restating main ideas in summary form, and at summarizing more efficiently than those who received vocabulary instruction. Instructional effects did not, however, transfer to general comprehension performance as measured by a standardized achievement test.