Want your students to understand and retain more of what they read? Far and away the best way to do this is to ask students to summarize a piece of text. After students have read a passage, ask them to write a paragraph of 4 or 5 sentences summarizing the most important points in the passage. If your students have trouble doing this at first, let them work with a partner or trio to write their summaries. This technique is great for any content area and will work wonders for not only comprehension but also remembering key points in a text.