Daniel Boudah: The Main Idea Strategy
Daniel J. Boudah, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
East Carolina University
As students shift from the skills emphasis of elementary grades to the content emphasis of secondary grades, they face greater demands to read and comprehend information from textbooks, take notes from lectures, work independently, and express understanding in written compositions and on state achievement tests. For students who haven’t acquired the requisite academic skills, the challenge of mastering content often results in failure, particularly in demanding general education classes. In response to this challenge, some low performing students, including those with learning disabilities, have acquired and use specific learning strategies to become successful despite weaknesses in knowledge and achievement.
What is a 'Learning Strategy'?
A learning strategy is an individual’s way of organizing and using a particular set of skills in order to learn content or accomplish other tasks more effectively and efficiently in school as well as in non-academic settings (e.g., Schumaker & Deshler, 1992). For many years, research has suggested that use of learning strategies can improve student performance in inclusive settings or on grade appropriate tasks. Deshler, Schumaker, and associates have researched and developed a number of strategies, including the Word Identification Strategy in which results indicated that the number of oral reading errors decreased while reading comprehension scores increased for all students on performance level and grade level tasks (Lenz & Hughes, 1990).
Why do we need this new Main Idea Strategy?
Given the context of student needs and demands, as well as the proven success of existing learning strategies, the Main Idea Strategy was researched and developed based on several important points. First, most secondary school reading requires that students infer meaning from poorly organized and written textbooks (e.g., Christmas, 1999). Second, high or even acceptable student performance on state reading tests depends on students’ success at determining inferential main ideas (e.g., North Carolina Public Schools, 2004), affecting districts’ measures of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in conjunction with No Child Left Behind regulations. Third, previously researched and developed strategies to enable low performing students to understand main ideas (e.g., Schumaker, Denton, & Deshler, 1984) may be insufficient because they are typically often limited to finding literal, rather than inferential, main ideas.
The Main Idea Strategy consists of five steps:
- Make the topic known,
- Accent at least two essential details,
- Ink out the clarifying details,
- Note what the essential details all say about the topic
- Infer the main idea.
The steps are easily remembered with the first-letter mnemonic “MAIN-I.” Teachers teach the strategy to students following an instructional sequence of four parts with lessons, a variation of the instructional stages used in the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) (e.g., Schumaker & Deshler, 1992). Complete details, directions, handouts, visuals can be found in the Main Idea Strategy Instructional Manual, and reading passages and answer keys can be found in the Main Idea Strategy Student Practice Lessons Book, both available at www.lulu.com.
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About the author: Dr. Daniel Boudah previously taught general education and special education in public schools and has successfully written grants and carried out field-based research in schools in the areas of teacher planning and inquiry, learning strategies, content enhancements, and collaborative instruction. He will present a 3-hour pre-conference session at TRLD 2009. More at http://www.ecu.edu/cs-educ/ci/sped/boudahd.cfm
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