ABSTRACT

There is a need for a tutor that coaches students through the process of composing a written summary. Summarizing is increasingly valued by teachers, as well as by school accountability experts, not only as an important skill in its own right, but as a means of promoting deeper levels of comprehension and learning. How to teach kids to summarize is the problem. Conveying the underlying strategies is the easy part, but like most skills, one learns by doing, and in this case it takes a lot of practice. Few schools have the resources to guide individual students through multiple drafts and revisions of their summaries or essays. Summary Street® was designed to address this problem by giving students lots of opportunity to summarize informational text guided by individualized feedback. As a true offspring of LSA, feedback from Summary Street® is directed at the content of the writing. It tells the writer whether the summary conveys enough informa-

tion about each of the main topics of a text; whether the summary is of the appropriate length; and whether it contains repeated information or information that is not highly relevant to the overall topic. It also warns the writer if too much of the material has been lifted directly from the source text and, of course, it provides a spell check. However, Summary Street®

does not provide feedback on other problems with the mechanics of writing, such as sentence structure and punctuation, nor does it assess style, organization, and the truth value of the content.