eng Science and Education Publishing American Journal of Educational Research 2327-6150 2015-12-01 3 12 1592 1596 10.12691/education-3-12-16 EDUCATION201531216 article Eliseo Reategui eliseo.reategui@ufrgs.br 1 Daniel Epstein 1 PGIE, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Graphic organizers may be a helpful instrument in assisting students to structure their text productions. This paper presents a mining tool that is able to extract relevant terms and relationships from texts and shows how the tool may be used to help students in writing summaries. A particular tool is presented, explaining the technique used to analyze the texts, to extract relevant terms and build graphs from them. These graphs are then used by students as graphic organizers, helping them to reflect about the main ideas of the text before the actual writing task. Two experiments are presented in this paper, in which a total of 29 students were asked to read and summarize a short text with the assistance of the text mining tool. Results demonstrated that the tool helped students reflect about the main ideas of the text and supported the actual writing of the summaries. http://pubs.sciepub.com/education/3/12/16/education-3-12-16.pdf summarization writing text mining graphic organizers