Once bitten

Once bitten

Auto-markingPencil and paperOnline interactive
Overview
Using this Resource
Connecting to the Curriculum
Marking Student Responses
Working with Students
Further Resources
This task is about identifying important information that will help you get the main idea of a text.
Read "Once bitten" by David Hill, pages 43-48 School Journal Part 4, Number 3, 1994.

Question

a)  Choose the three pieces of information below that are most important to this text.

    • The storyteller liked Wild West movies.

    • The bikie's good manners.

    • Things kept sliding round on the tray.

    • The storyteller went to a coffee bar.

    • The storyteller thought the bikie had taken his muesli bar.

    • The storyteller spent his newspaper money.

    • The bikie was drinking a cup of coffee.

    • The bikie's appearance.

Question

b)  What is the main idea of this text?

    • Bikies have tattoos and leather gear.

    • You can't work out how people will behave from the way they look.

    • You should be careful who you sit next to when you're on your own.

    • You shouldn't eat other people's food.

Task administration: 
This task can be completed with pen and paper or online (with auto marking).
 
Equipment: "Once Bitten" by David Hill, School Journal, Part 4 Number 3 1994. 

What is the main idea?

  1. Remind students that the main idea is what the author wants readers to understand is most important and valued in the text as a whole.
  2. Explain to students that finding the main idea is hard, but that it can be found if they first work out which information is important to the text. Explain that important information will be mentioned more than unimportant information.
  3. Explain that a) assesses if they understand which information is important. Tell the students that first they need to read the story Once bitten, pages 43 to 48, then select the three pieces of information they think are important.
  4. Explain that b) assesses if they understand what the main idea is. Tell the students that they need to think about the important information in the text they identified at a), then put a tick next to the main idea.
  5. Before reading, it may be helpful if students discussed the meaning of the word "bikie", i.e., someone who belongs to a gang of motorbike riders.
  6. The task can be done individually or in groups.
  7. Responses can be discussed by teacher and student only, or within larger groups.
Level:
4
Curriculum info: 
English, Making meaning, Reading
Key Competencies: 
Thinking
Keywords: 
main idea, comprehension, narrative, School Journal, inference, think critically, SJ-4-3-1994
Description of task: 
Students are assessed on the ability to identify important information in order to establish the main idea of a narrative text about being judgemental. Reading age 10-12. SJ-4-3-1994. Text provided.
Curriculum Links: 
Links to the Literacy Learning Progressions for Reading:
This resource helps to identify students’ ability to:
  • reflect critically about character
  • infer ideas and information that are not directly stated in the text
as described in the Literacy Learning Progressions for Reading at: http://www.literacyprogressions.tki.org.nz/The-Structure-of-the-Progressions.
Learning Progression Frameworks
This resource can provide evidence of learning associated with
Making sense of text: reading critically, set 4
Reading for literary experience, set 5
within the Reading Learning Progressions Frameworks.
Read more about the Learning Progressions Frameworks.
Answers/responses: 
a) Student identifies the three most important pieces of information:

  • The bikie's good manners.
  • The storyteller thought the bikie had taken his muesli bar.
  • The bikie's appearance.
b) Student identifies the main idea of the story:

  • You can't work out how people will behave from the way they look.
Diagnostic and formative information: 
This resource was trialled by 32 Year 7 and 8 students. The trial involved small groups of students across four schools.

Distinguishing between important and relatively unimportant information – Most students correctly identified one out of the three pieces of important information.

Although most trial students correctly identified one of the important pieces of information, over half also identified one particular piece of relatively unimportant information. The one correct piece of information they easily identified was The storyteller thought the bikie had taken his muesli bar. The piece of information that over half the students incorrectly identified was The storyteller went to a coffee bar. The storyteller's preoccupation with the coffee bar at the beginning of the narrative could have swayed the students who made an inappropriate choice about the relative importance of this information. Students probably empathised with the storyteller and thought of it as a significant event in his life.

The other correct pieces of important information were The bikie's good manners, which about half of the students identified, and The bikie's appearance, which a quarter of the students identified. One sixth of trial students identified all three pieces of important information.

Important information:

  • Information about The storyteller thought the bikie had taken his muesli bar begins in the last paragraph of page 45, and includes all of pages 46, 47 and 48 with all the details about how the storyteller challenged the bikie as evidence of his mistaken belief about the bikie. The visual text on these pages supports the written text.
  • Information about The bikie's good manners is on page 45, "He looked at me and gave me a 'hiya' sort of nod"; on page 46, "the bikie had put it [the muesli bar] back on his plate. He gave another nod, picked up the muesli bar and took another bite (a smaller and neater bite than mine) from his end. He put the bar back down on the plate again"; and page 47, "His little finger was bent in the air like some terribly polite person does when holding a nice cup of tea. He carefully bit the final piece of bar exactly in half...He held the last little bit of muesli bar across the table towards me".
  • Information about The bikie's appearance is on pages 44, 45 and 47. For example, on page 44, the last paragraph; on page 45, the first paragraph and also what the storyteller implies in the sentence connecting appearance with expected behaviour "I wondered if he'd lean across and bite me, or pick me up and squash me into a sugar bowl or something"; on page 47, "the tattooed terror". The visual text on these pages supports the written text.

Relatively unimportant information:

  • The storyteller liked Wild West movies is suggested only on page 14, e.g., "It felt like a movie. One of those Wild West movies where the good guy and the bad guy..."
  • The storyteller spent his newspaper money is mentioned twice, once on page 43, "The first time I got paid for my paper round, I went to a coffee bar."; and on page 46, "I'd paid for it with my newspaper money."
  • Things kept sliding round on the tray is mentioned within two sentences on page 44.
  • The bikie was drinking a cup of coffee is mentioned once on page 45, second paragraph.
  • The storyteller went to a coffee bar is in the opening sentence on page 43.

The two pieces of information that students commonly mistook as important were: The storyteller spent his newspaper money and The storyteller went to a coffee bar. As these pieces of information are mentioned only once or twice, they cannot be seen as important to the text as a whole.

Finding the main idea – Three quarters of students correctly chose You can't work out how people will behave from the way they look as the main idea.

The majority of students chose the correct main idea at b) yet failed to identify all the important information at a). Students were unable to link the two tasks and reflect on their responses at a).

Also, it cannot be assumed that those students who correctly identified the main idea can do so independently because this resource provides considerable scaffolding. For example, in a) the students only have to choose between eight pieces of information, whereas if they were independently finding the main idea they would need to choose between all the information a text presents. Students are also scaffolded towards rejecting the five relatively unimportant pieces of information in a) because these pieces of information are fairly obviously not important since they are given considerably less weight in the text than the three pieces of important information.

A quarter of the students incorrectly identified the last two options You should be careful who you sit next to when you're on your own and You shouldn't eat other people's food as the main idea. These students appear to be overly influenced by moral and safety issues and therefore responded to the subjective content of these main idea options. These students do not understand that a main idea cannot be based purely on a personal response to text.

Next steps: 
Students having difficulty finding important information
If students have identified relatively unimportant information in a) as important, it may be necessary for them to go through the text to find the details that relate to each piece of information. Once they have done this, they will see that the relatively unimportant information gets little mention in the text; they will then have evidence showing them to reject it as unimportant.

If the students did the assessment task individually, it might be best for them to work through this process in pairs, each pair looking for details about only one or two pieces of information given in a) on the student sheet. Teachers will first need to model the process of finding details and deciding if they are important or unimportant. Think aloud as you do so and make a note of the page you find details on. When the students have completed their search, each pair can then report back to the group. Tell the students that if there are too many details to write down, they can simply write, for example, "Page 44 – paragraphs 2 and 3".

See the paragraph on the previous page under the headings Important information and Relatively unimportant information for where the details relating to each piece of information given in a) on the student sheet can be found.

This process will help students distinguish between minor plot details and important information that the author values.

Students having difficulty monitoring their comprehension
When students correctly identify the main idea at b) but they do not identify important information at a), support them to make links between tasks a) and b). Say to students "How does the main idea you'
ve identified match the important information you've identified at a)? The main idea has to contain the key ideas from each piece of important information. So each piece of important information has to link to the main idea. Check that your work at task a) and b) match. Write key ideas and draw arrows on your sheet to show how these link."

Students having difficulty identifying the main idea
By working through the grouping process for establishing the important information described above, draw student attention to how all of these need to be captured and combined to get the main idea. For example:

Important information at a) ............................... is captured in this part of the main idea:
The storyteller thought the bikie had taken his muesli bar, i.e., the storyteller's mistaken belief about the bikie. You can't work out...
The bikie's good manners. ...how people will behave...
The bikie's appearance. ...from the way they look.

For students who do not understand that a main idea cannot be based purely on a personal response to text, explain to them that the main idea is what the author thinks is important and valued. Ask them, "Which of the sentences at b) do you think the author would agree with?"

Duffy, G. (2003). Explaining reading: A resource for teaching concepts, skills, and strategies. NewYork, NY: The Guilford Press.
Ministry of Education. (2006). Effective Literacy Practice is Years 5 to 8. Wellington: Learning Media Limited.