Sentence-Level Gist: Literacy Instruction for Students With Learning Disabilities in Co-Taught Classrooms

Several strategies that demonstrate promise are available for educators to improve reading comprehension outcomes for students. However, some students, including students with and at risk for learning disabilities, require more intensive supports to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. To support these students, teachers must intensify instruction. This article describes an intensive main idea identification strategy, sentence-level gist, for teachers to use with students with persistent reading comprehension difficulties in the co-taught classroom. The sentence-level gist strategy requires students to determine the subject and important words in each sentence and then synthesize this information to write a main idea statement for a section of a text.

Supporting Main Idea Identification and Text Summarization in Middle School Co-Taught Classes

Being able to identify the main ideas within a complex multi-paragraph content-area text is an essential reading comprehension skill. It is especially important for content-area and special education co-teachers to provide explicit instruction in this skill to meet the needs of their students with learning disabilities who frequently struggle with understanding text they read. To help students with main idea identification, co-teachers can provide students with explicit instruction on how to generate a main idea statement for individual paragraphs or sections of a text. Co-teachers can extend this instruction by incorporating peer-mediated practice to help students strengthen their main idea statements. Finally, co-teachers can instruct students to use their statements to summarize the text. This article provides guidance for supporting the main idea identification and text summarization skills of middle school students in a co-taught classroom.