How Summarizing Improves Comprehension:

Summarizing text provides the opportunity for readers to identify, paraphrase, and integrate important information in the text. It requires the reader to recall and state the gist he (or she) has constructed. Therefore, a reader who can summarize has activated background knowledge to integrate information appearing in the text, allocated attention to the main points, and evaluated the gist for consistency. The inability of the reader to summarize text indicates that comprehension is incomplete.