Determining Importance

Last month our focus was non-fiction reading strategies, and we continue this discussion with how students determine what is important in the text.  Determining importance is a strategy that readers use to distinguish between what information in a text is most important versus what information is interesting but not necessary for comprehension. The strategy enables students to distinguish between the most and least important information presented in textbooks and nonfiction reading.  While reading fiction texts, students will be inferring the bigger idea or theme.  In nonfiction texts, students will use determining importance to gain information, acquire knowledge, or use features and text clues to help build deeper comprehension of the text.  We tell students they need to become detectives and search for the most important points of the text. We remind them that along the way there will be distractions, or less important information, given to make the selection more interesting or clearer to the reader. This information, however, is not essential to understanding the point of the nonfiction or fiction text. 

The main questions students use to determine the important information is: 

©    What is my purpose for reading this text?

©    What is the author’s purpose for writing this text?

©    Identify the key ideas.

©    Use text features (discussed in last month’s blog) to help identify important ideas, concepts, and details.

You can help your child at home by using the following sentence starters to deepen their comprehension of the text:

    ©     “The most important ideas are…”

    ©     “So far, I've learned that…

      ©      “This paragraph/selection is mostly about…”