4-1 Skills: Summarizing and Synthesizing

Summarizing means to state the main ideas in a lecture; synthesizing means to join ideas together. Summarizing and synthesizing questions for the CAEL Assessment relate to demonstrating your understanding of the main points presented in the lecture, or showing that you understand certain aspects of one main point.

Questions related to summarizing come near the end of a lecture, or at the end of a section of a lecture, because this is when the lecturer reviews the main points that were presented. These are usually short answer questions and you may sometimes need to elaborate on your answers. Sometimes the number of points you get will relate to how much detail you provide as well how accurate your response is.

In this lecture about pest control, test takers are asked to summarize the three main points given in the concluding statement of the lecture.