Strategy Instruction to Support Struggling Readers in Comprehending Expository Main Ideas

Abstract

This article describes a comprehension strategy that can be used by teachers to help students identify and construct the main ideas for expository texts. The BURNS Strategy (i.e., Box. Underline. Reread. Note. Summarize.) was developed as part of a larger reading intervention to improve the comprehension performance of struggling readers in the elementary grades. The BURNS strategy was designed to incorporate thinking scaffolds and question prompts to guide students through a thinking process that might help them construct the main ideas. This article reports on the teaching process and instructional scaffolds used in the intervention, and discusses implications for teaching main ideas in the intervention setting.

Keywords

expository comprehension strategy instruction reading comprehension main-idea intervention elementary struggling readers

Teaching students to closely read informational texts to determine the key ideas and details is a fundamental skill identified in the Common Core State Standards (Hagaman & Casey, 2017). At one level of “close-reading” in the comprehension process, students are expected to read closely to understand “What the text says.” This means that students understand the expository text at a surface level through the comprehension of the main ideas and details. This surface-level comprehension precedes deeper levels of close reading and analysis (Beck & Sandora, 2016). At a second level, students read to understand “What the text means.” At this level, students think more deeply about the meaning by forming inferences, activating background knowledge, identifying the author’s purpose, and building bridges between the text and other experiences (Jones et al., 2015; Shanahan, 2012).

Expository comprehension is a complex process because readers must construct the superordinate and subordinate relationships among a set of ideas (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978). At a global level, expository comprehension includes an awareness of the overall structure or organization of the passage that is used to orchestrate the selection and arrangement of ideas to achieve particular purposes, such as compare–contrast, problem–solution, cause–effect, and sequence text structures (Meyer et al., 1980). The readers’ metacognitive knowledge of these patterns can aid them in detecting, synthesizing, organizing, and comprehending the ideas.

Simultaneously, at the local or microstructural level, the construction of meaning is accomplished through the readers’ discernment of the main ideas and details. In this manner, skilled readers operate at two levels: (a) they search for the top-level pattern that unifies the ideas at the macro- or passage level and (b) they search for the paragraph-level meanings that can confirm, dispute, or populate the cognitive framework that is being formulated with textual ideas and evidence. The process is iterative and interactive, insofar as the meanings built at the local level inform the reader’s identification and construction of the overall macrostructure of the text, or vice versa, as the text’s macrostructure supports readers in identifying and constructing meanings at the local level.

Although the comprehension of macro-level text structures and micro-level main ideas represent critical reading abilities (Jitendra & Gajria, 2011), struggling readers exhibit several difficulties that affect their ability to comprehend the surface-level meanings of the text (Ciullo et al., 2014). These difficulties include (a) identifying the text structure or organizational pattern, (b) distinguishing related details from those that are irrelevant or unimportant, (c) categorizing and generating the superordinate label for a set of details, (d) inferring meanings, (e) summarizing or paraphrasing the main ideas and details, and (f) applying metacognitive strategies for maintaining attention, self-monitoring understanding, and employing fix-up strategies to address comprehension breakdowns (Stevens et al., 2019).

Three approaches have been found to be effective in addressing the reading difficulties of students related to the comprehension of main ideas. One is a schema-based approach where teachers explicitly teach expository text structures such as compare–contrast, problem–solution, cause–effect, sequence (Meyer et al., 1980; Williams, 2005). Often, this approach involves presenting graphic organizers for a particular text structure, and then, students search the expository passage for the signal words, categories, and details that complete the organizer. A second approach is to teach students to summarize the main ideas in passages by implementing a paraphrasing and self-instructional routine that prompts students to apply a three-step process, such as the RAP strategy (Hagaman & Casey, 2017):

1. Read.

2. Ask yourself: What is the main idea and two details?

3. Put the main idea and details in your own words.

A third approach is to teach students the rules for identifying main ideas based on Brown and Day’s (1983) summarization work: (a) delete trivial information, (b) delete redundant information, (c) generalize information using a superordinate category name, (d) select main ideas from the text, and (e) invent one if not explicitly stated. Meta-analyses show that the effect sizes for main-idea interventions tend to be very large (e.g., Effect Size = 0.97) and statistically significant (Stevens et al., 2019).

Despite the effectiveness of main-idea interventions, the concept of “main idea” can be a difficult notion for struggling readers to grasp (Williams, 1988, 2003), and there is instructional ambiguity in knowing what prompts can be provided when the main ideas are not easily discerned. For example, many main-idea routines prompt students to identify the main idea by asking themselves “What is the paragraph mostly about” (Hagaman & Casey, 2017; Hagaman & Reid, 2008; Hedin et al., 2011; Mason et al., 2006). Next students are instructed to “Put the main idea in your own words.” However, there are few tips or clues beyond those prompts to break the process into smaller steps that mirror the cognitive operations that skilled readers perform when they infer the main ideas. This can be problematic for struggling readers, especially in the early grades (Williams, 2003, 2005).

Furthermore, it is likely that students who have difficulties with vocabulary, comprehension, and self-regulation will require even more support to read and infer key ideas and details from complex texts (Ciullo et al., 2016). This includes students with learning disabilities, students with emotional and behavioral disorders, and students with autism spectrum disorder. For these students, the body of research suggests they exhibit persistent reading difficulties that necessitate explicit instruction in comprehension strategies (Jitendra et al., 2011; Whalon et al., 2009), together with an instructional focus on the role of text structures in expository texts (Carnahan & Williamson, 2013, 2016), the use of graphic organizers to represent passage information (Carnahan & Williamson, 2016; Dexter & Hughes, 2011; Knight et al., 2013; Stone et al., 2008), and explicit instruction in main idea or text summarization strategies (Ennis, 2016; Howorth et al., 2016; Jitendra et al., 2000; Sanders et al., 2018).

To address the need for explicit cognitive tools to support expository comprehension, a comprehension strategy was developed and implemented to help students with persistent reading difficulties to identify and summarize the main ideas and details in expository text. The BURNS (i.e., Box. Underline. Reread. Note. Summarize.) strategy prompted students to underline and reread key details to identify the main idea in a word or phrase, and if this initial approach was not successful, they learned to apply successive thinking routines to identify the main idea. In addition, the focus of the BURNS strategy was on prompting meaning-making strategies to represent text meanings at two levels: (a) the main ideas and details at the local or paragraph level, and (b) the relationship across paragraphs through a summarization routine that focused on the organizational structure and representation of ideas at the passage level.

Although the focus of this article is on BURNS, it was only one strategy routine as part of a larger literacy project called i-DISC (Interactive Dialogic Strategic Close Reading). Four i-DISC strategy routines (see Figure 1) were taught and implemented recursively and flexibly to build students’ competence in interacting with the text to read for meaning (Mariage, Englert & Mariage, 2020). For example, CLASS was a strategy framework that was designed to help students understand the social norms for respectful talk and communication in the classroom. The BURNS strategy was the main-idea summarization routine to focus on the surface-level meaning in the text (i.e., what the text says), consistent with researchers’ recommendations that the comprehension of the gist should come first (Beck & Sandora, 2016; Williams, 1988). The MARK-IT/JOT-IT strategy routine guides students to talk-to-the-text as they annotate the text by recording their thoughts, strategies, and responses in the margins, such as questions, connections, clarifications, and inferences (i.e., what the text means to me). The DISCUSS-IT strategy was intended to help students discuss the text with peers as they shared their thoughts, strategies, and questions in small-group discussion. The i-DISC graphic served as a reminder that the meanings constructed by readers as they interacted with text were influenced by many cognitive and social factors (i.e., text, reader, context) that extended well beyond the literal meanings prompted by the text. Although explicit instruction may focus on one facet of the close-reading process (e.g., BURNS), each strategy must be reconnected and reincorporated into the larger set of thinking and discussion routines at multiple levels for deeper comprehension and mastery to result. Students build layers of meaning that engages and deepens background knowledge as they interact with the text, peers, teacher, and instructional scaffolds.

Figure 1.

i-DISC framework.

The BURNS strategy cue card with self-talk stems was used to guide students through the following cognitive steps:

B: Box the paragraph.

U: Underline the important details (annotate the text).

R: Reread the underlined details to name the main idea. Ask myself these four questions:

Stop and think. What is this part mostly about?

Paraphrase. What can I call these ideas? Use a word, phrase, or heading.

Look for clue words. Is there a clue word or idea that is repeated over and over?

Categorize. Does this tell about a category or link to a big idea in a graphic organizer?

N: Note the main idea in the margins.

S: Summarize the main idea and details in your own words.

Lesson Framework

The teaching process for BURNS was informed by the literature on direct instruction routines for teaching main ideas (Jitendra & Gajria, 2011) and the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) framework (Harris et al., 2003). Specifically, the instructional phases in BURNS were designed to (a) build background knowledge for the strategy, (b) model the strategy, (c) provide guided practice, (d) implement collaborative practice, (e) present independent practice with corrective feedback, and (f) support generalization to authentic texts and contexts.

Background Knowledge for Close Reading

To develop students’ background knowledge for BURNS, the teacher and students brainstormed what was meant by close reading. Six qualities were discussed.

We closely read passages that require us to think deeply.

We reread the text multiple times to understand more fully.

We read with a “pen in our hand” to annotate the text in ways that help us think and remember information.

We mark up the text by underlining key details, making notes in the margins, and asking questions.

We use thinking strategies to understand the passage (questioning, clarifying, connecting, commenting, predicting, and summarizing).

We discuss what we read to get new ideas, clarify, ask and answer questions, make connections, and learn from one another.

Model the BURNS Strategy

In the first BURNS lesson, the teacher discusses the strategy, as she familiarizes students with how a set of details can form a category or big idea. At first, the teacher models how to infer the category for a set of details using a think-aloud. For example, an image of a chicken, cow, and horse on the detail lines of a web would prompt the teacher to think aloud about how the ideas go together, and what big idea or main category could be used to describe these details. This big idea is noted in the box next to the details (e.g., farm animals). Guided practice follows as students are shown other pictured objects and they are asked to identify what category subsumes the objects. For example, pictures of different types of cars (e.g., jeep, SUV, Chevy truck) are shown and students are prompted to identify the category by asking: “What is this mostly about? What do these things have in common?” Their answer (“types of cars”) is written in the category or main-idea box. Later, the process shifts to reading through a set of single word details (e.g., chair, table, couch), and selecting the big idea, heading, or category (types of furniture) from a list of main ideas that described the relationship.

Next, the teacher models the BURNS strategy using short paragraphs from authentic text. Beside each paragraph is a main-idea box to prompt the meaning-making process. A paragraph example from one passage, the Komodo Dragon (Reading A-Z.com, n.d.), is shown in a cue card with the strategy steps in Figure 2. An example of a think-aloud for this section of text follows.

Figure 2.

BURNS strategy cue card with burned paragraph.

After reading the paragraph from the passage, the teacher “thinks-aloud” and models the steps on the strategy cue card as she rereads the paragraph and models the BURNS strategies.

1. Box the Paragraph

For this step, the teacher draws a box around the paragraph and explains that good readers break text into chunks and think what each chunk means.

2. Underline the Important Details

The teacher annotates the text by underlining the key details in the paragraph while thinking-aloud about why the ideas are important. For example, the teacher explains,

Next, I will read and annotate the text by underlining the important details and facts. I don’t need to underline the entire sentence, I underline the key words and phrases that tell the most important information. So when I read the sentence “Komodo dragons are the heavyweight wrestlers of the lizard world and they’re built for a fight,” I’m underlining the key ideas “heavyweight wrestlers” and “built for a fight.” Now I’ll read the next sentences to find other details that tell me more about the topic. (Teacher reads next two sentences.) As I read these sentences, I’ll underline the phrases “use their muscular tails for balance” and “covered with bony plates.” I think these are important because they tell me how the dragon is built and how its body features help him to be a good fighter. In this way, I am reading to find important information in a paragraph or chunk of text. When I find important details, I mark up and annotate the text by underlining the key ideas.

3. Reread the Underlined Details

The teacher performs the third step in the self-instructional routine by saying: The third step is R: Reread the underlined details to name the main idea.

The teacher further explains:

After readers underline the details, they stop–think–paraphrase by asking themselves: “What did I just read? What is this part mostly about?” and “What can I call the ideas?” Readers paraphrase and express the main idea using a word, phrase, or heading. So I am going to go back and reread the underlined details . . . “muscular tails used for balance, grab opponents with forelegs, covered with bony plates for protection, huge claws, and jagged teeth” I’m asking myself “What is this part mostly about? What can I call the ideas using a word or phrase?” I think these details are telling me about the Dragon’s body features (tails, bony plates, claws, teeth), and how these features help them to be good fighters. Although the entire passage is about Komodo Dragons, this specific part is telling me “How Komodo dragons are built to fight.”

To check myself or if I am unsure, I can ask myself the third question. I can look for clue words or repeated ideas to confirm the main idea of this part. In this paragraph, for example, the ideas that I see repeated are “built for a fight,” “males fight,” “opponents,” and “battle.” These repeated ideas all have to do with battle and fighting. So these words provide more clues that confirm the main idea is about how the Komodo dragon is built to fight and battle.

4. Note the Main Idea

For the fourth step, the teacher models how to record the main idea in a word or phrase. She says,

I think the ideas in this paragraph are telling me “How the Komodo Dragon is built to fight.” So I’m going to write this phrase in the margins to remind myself what this part is all about . . . “How they are built to fight,” or I can shorten it further and write “built to fight” in the margins. All of the details in this paragraph are telling me how the Komodo dragons are built to fight their opponents, so I think this is the main idea.

5. Summarize the Main Idea in Your Own Words

Finally, the teacher summarizes by restating the main idea and two or more details in a summary.

So this paragraph tells me about “How the Komodo Dragon is built to fight” . . . The evidence that supports this main idea is that the Komodo dragon has bony plates, sharp teeth, long claws, and strong tails that help him to fight.”

Throughout the modeling stage, the rationale and purpose of the main-idea strategy is also discussed by the teacher:

When I look back at what I have done, the notes in the margins will tell me what each paragraph is about. This helps me to remember and comprehend because I’ll know what each part is talking about. Annotating the main ideas in the margins is a useful note-taking and comprehension strategy.

The teacher also points to each step and question on the cue card as it is modeled, and students are given a copy of the cue card to remind them of the steps.

Guided Practice

Once the process is modeled, students receive guided practice over consecutive lessons, first using short paragraphs displayed on a smartboard as the students employ the strategy routine with the supervision and feedback of the teacher. Together the students and teacher work together to “BURN” the paragraphs, formulating the main ideas, and offering feedback and explanations to each other. As the lessons progress, the teacher transfers more control of the thinking process to students. Students are invited up to the smartboard to employ the strategy as they box the paragraph, underline and annotate the key details, reread the details, ask and answer the prompts to help them to identify the main idea of the paragraph, and explain their thinking based on the textual evidence. This stage also allows the teacher to assess student confidence and mastery of the routine.

Collaborative Practice

Next students work with partners during a collaborative phase to annotate and paraphrase the text in a supported context. Then the partners share and report their underlined details and main ideas to the class using a digital projector. In this way, the BURNS strategy is defined, discussed, modeled, practiced, and mastered in a gradual transfer-of-control model similar to “I Do, We Do, You Do” (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983). The goal is that students will learn to break the text into chunks, and then apply the stop–think–paraphrase BURNS questions to actively construct the main ideas and details as they read other expository passages.

Independent Practice

Finally, for the independent performance step, students are asked to read four-paragraph passages that they “burn” by recording the main ideas in the marginal boxes. This information is used by the teacher to check for increased performance and strategy usage, and to provide feedback to students in the next lesson or to refine the strategy intervention. To ensure that students become aware of their strategy performance, students are asked to self-rate their performance using the BURNS scorecard. The scorecard asks students to indicate their level of implementation for each strategy step on a 5-point scale in answer to four questions: Did I Box each paragraph? Did I Underline key details? Did I Reread my underlined details? Did I Note the main idea next to each box?

Modifying the Routine to Support Performance

After examining the performance of students in the guided and supported phases of the lesson, three adjustments were made to the BURNS strategy, which are reflected in the third and fourth questions listed under the R—Reread step in Figure 2. These modifications were designed to improve student’s understanding of the broader set of relationships and connections within and across paragraphs, and prompts were added to restart the thinking process when a student’s first effort to identify the main idea was unsuccessful.

One adjustment was designed to help students conceptualize how the comprehension of main ideas at the paragraph level might help them to understand the relationships, connections, and meanings at the passage level. To move students beyond paragraph-level comprehension, the teacher introduced a graphic organizer, so students can see how the ideas that they are constructing at the local level can be mapped to represent what they are understanding at a global level. The annotated ideas from each paragraph are recorded on the detail lines, and the category for each paragraph is recorded in the category or main-idea box. The teacher models and thinks aloud about how to transfer the underlined details to the map and, by rereading the details, confirms how the details support and prove the main ideas. This step brings the meaning-construction processes at the local and global levels into closer alignment and demonstrates how note-taking and representational maps can be incorporated into a larger reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn process. Students also observe how the information and meanings within and across paragraphs are connected and integrated to build a coherent whole (Beck & Sandora, 2016). Thereafter, students orally summarize and justify the main ideas and details in their annotated text based on the BURNS strategy, and the teacher gathers the collectively created gist statements into a graphic organizer that can be displayed in the classroom and distributed to students. Within the summarize step in BURNS, conversations between the teacher and students help individuals to address confusions, offer feedback from peers on their ideas, and prepare them to comprehend the next section of challenging text (Beck & Sandora, 2016). At this point, students are not expected to create their own graphic organizers, but the goal is to promote talk and offer a visual representation to embody and support the meanings they negotiate together.

A second adjustment is incorporated into the strategy routine to scaffold the performance of students who struggle to identify the main ideas in expository paragraphs. Sifting through the multiple details in a paragraph to generate a single conceptual category can be confusing and problematic for struggling readers. Williams (2003) argued that main-idea comprehension amounts to the reader’s categorization or classification of the details into a conceptual category, and categorization depends on domain knowledge. As the main ideas for animal topics represent domain knowledge that recurs across the animal passages, a checklist based on the organizer is developed to remind the students of the common categories that typified animal topics. Categories on the main-idea checklist include the following: What it looks like, Where it lives, How it hunts, What it eats, What it does/behavior, How it survives/protects self, babies and young, dangers/threats. An abbreviated example of a cue card for Komodo dragons that shows both the text-structure categories and the mapped content from four paragraphs is shown in Figure 3. To prompt students to consult and consider this text-structure cue card, a fourth question is added to the Reread step: “Does this (paragraph) tell about a category, or link to a big idea in a graphic organizer or text-structure map?” This question ties the summarization process at the local level to the broader categories associated with the topic or text structure at the passage level. Subsequent observations may show that this scaffold is useful, as reflected in the number of times that students consult the main-idea checklist and check off categories when they read new expository passages. Although this checklist is specific to animal topics, the construction and invention of superordinate categories can be folded into the prereading step as part of a process of previewing the topics and headings in a passage and generating a list of potential topics and categories in preparation for reading the passage (Mason, 2013).

Figure 3.

Graphic organizer and main-idea checklist.

A third adjustment is made because many students may still have difficulties in identifying the main idea when it is not explicitly stated in the text. Inferring a single category or main idea is especially difficult when authentic texts are ill structured, the details are not sufficiently developed, or they are ambiguously related. An example of a text where readers must infer the main idea follows from another paragraph from the Komodo dragon passage:

During the day, these giant lizards often deal with the heat by staying cool in burrows. At night, the burrows help them stay warm. They may dig their own burrow or use one made by another dragon. Komodo dragons usually spend their time alone—hunting, eating, and napping. (Reading A-Z.com, n.d., p. 8)

In this case, it may be difficult for many students to discern the main idea by asking themselves “what is this mostly about?” or by matching the details to the categories in the graphic organizer. This single paragraph touches on three distinct ideas (i.e., temperature, burrows, how dragons spend their time). Any one of these ideas might become the main idea of the paragraph if it is linked to a sufficient number of supporting details. To help students problem-solve and identify what the paragraph is mostly about, a third prompt is added as a third question below the Rereading step in Figure 2 (“Is there a clue word or idea that is repeated over and over?”). Given this prompt, students reread to search for repeated ideas or words that linked together. Students are able to see that the word “burrow” is repeated 3 times, leading them to hypothesize that the main idea of this paragraph is mostly about the burrows of Komodo dragons.

Together, the four questions help students break down the cognitive task into a manageable routine that helps them identify the main ideas through a series of steps. If students can discern the main idea from any single step or question, they can end the process at that step. Each successive prompt is designed to “jump-start” the thinking process to support the generation of the main ideas in slightly different ways.

Outcomes and Instructional Considerations

The BURNS intervention can be an effective routine to help students understand how to construct main ideas. However, the strategy protocol was tested by teaching the routine to a small group of third-grade students. Five students were identified by their teachers as needing additional support in the area of reading comprehension. On the winter AIMSweb MAZE assessment (Shinn & Shinn, 2002), given just prior to the current study, four of the five students scored below benchmark, with three of those students identified as needing “intensive” supports (Tier 3). One student was identified as being below benchmark, but at the “strategic” level (Tier 2). This small group received forty 30-min lessons, consistent with the instructional work of other researchers who taught main-idea summarization routines to students in groups of nine or fewer participants (Hagaman & Reid, 2008; Harris et al., 2019; Hedin et al., 2011).

To evaluate students’ ability to construct main ideas, students were asked to record the main ideas for eight-paragraph expository passages. The teacher read aloud the passage as the student followed along on a printed copy. Students were instructed to annotate the text as the teacher read aloud by underlining key details. At the end of each paragraph, the teacher paused and asked the student to record the main idea of the paragraph in a box in the margins. In addition, students were given additional time to reread the passage and make final decisions about the main ideas for each paragraph. When pretest–posttest performance was examined, students improved in their ability to identify main ideas, increasing their average performance from 25% accuracy on the pretest to 75% on the posttest. Furthermore, the students’ performance on the third-grade MAZE nearly doubled for three of the five students in a 4-month period, and two other students improved their posttest scores over pretest results by 30% and 35%. Whereas four of the five students performed below benchmark levels on the MAZE at pretest, all four students improved by one or more risk levels (i.e., from intensive to strategic, or from strategic to benchmark) on the posttest. Furthermore, one student tested out of the Tier 2 intensive intervention group because she reached benchmark levels on the comprehension assessment. Thus, all students made progress during the strategy intervention on a transfer measure of reading comprehension (Mariage et al., 2020).

Based on the instructional work in the classroom, six recommendations are offered to teachers who wish to implement the BURNS strategy. First, the initial paragraphs in an expository article are often introductory in nature, and introductions may provide an overview to the passage that covers multiple categories. In this case, there is not a single main idea. Thus, it is recommended that teachers discuss the purpose of an introductory paragraph to learn about the organization and topical structure of the article and to activate the background knowledge of students for the topic, but teacher modeling and implementation of the BURNS strategy should be applied to subsequent rather than the initial paragraph.

Second, BURNS is an important skill, but it is mentally taxing. Expecting students to “BURN” a 15-paragraph expository article is unreasonable, and this skill is best introduced and taught using short chunks of text. In the i-DISC project, for example, the BURNS strategy was integrated together with the MARK-IT/JOT-IT routine. This is consistent with Beck and Sandora’s (2016) recommendation that readers intersperse text reading with a focus on getting the gist, with student talk, and discussions about what it means. On alternate days or alternating passage segments, students applied the BURNS strategies to selected paragraphs, and applied the thinking MARK-IT/JOT-IT strategies to the same or new paragraphs. This ensured that students experienced the complete comprehension process so that they understood that there are successive readings that involve a suite of strategies that are implemented as part of a process of making meaning. In other words, BURNS was one tool in their comprehension toolbox, but it was supported by other strategies that were meant to be used recursively and flexibly. This is why the teacher emphasized that students needed to participate in conversations with partners and the small group about the meanings they were constructing. When students discuss what they are learning with other students, they arrive at a deeper understanding of the topic that goes far beyond the surface-level meanings they are constructing and beyond their prior knowledge meaning (Mariage et al., 2020).

Third, text-structure categories that encompass the domain knowledge for animals do not transfer to other expository topics and genres (e.g., biography, history, science). However, animal topics are beneficial for elementary students to develop mastery of the BURNS strategy, because the passages are interesting, motivating, and well structured. For passages about different topics, teachers are advised to engage students in previewing the passage and brainstorming possible categories and subtopics related to the passage during a prereading stage. This attention to text structure is an important prereading strategy and focusing on topical and informational knowledge invites students to share their background knowledge and domain knowledge for particular topics.

Fourth, preparation is important. Because the meaning-construction process can be challenging for teachers in the midst of teaching the lesson, it is recommended that teachers prepare the passage in advance. This includes the following steps.

Select passages that are relevant and interesting.

Annotate and BURN the passage in advance (e.g., know the difficult parts, and what cognitive moves to take to make sense of the text).

Construct a draft of an organizer that can be edited based on the work of the group to show the paragraph and passage-level structures of the passage.

Use the organizer to show students how comprehension works at the local and global levels to support comprehension.

In the process of mapping ideas, teachers can explain that the author’s text structure and plan for the passage is uncovered and revealed to readers in the map, just as they might create a writing map with their own ideas when they prepare to write. This might help students realize how they might transfer these skills as part of a reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn process.

Sixth, teachers always need to be prepared to adjust the program to offer more or fewer scaffolds. Students may need more support than anticipated. This requires the redesign and development of new cognitive prompts to help students successfully engage in the comprehension process. Likewise, teachers must be prepared to add visual and cognitive scaffolds to help students participate in the main-idea comprehension routine to formulate meanings at the local and global levels. Adjusting the prompts and comprehension scaffolds is a necessary part of effective and explicit strategy instruction.

Conclusion

The comprehension of main ideas is an essential component of the expository comprehension process. Yet it is a difficult cognitive process for many students with reading disabilities. The BURNS strategy is an effective protocol that might be used to help students get the gist within paragraphs and represent the broader meanings across paragraphs at the passage level. Teaching students to summarize the main ideas and details can deepen expository comprehension by teaching students the strategies that they may not otherwise employ. By implementing a series of cognitive steps and scaffolds in the BURNS strategy, students can reach a critical threshold of comprehension that prepares them to engage in deeper close-reading and analytical thinking processes.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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