Post written by Sarah Carlson, Deni Basaraba, Gina Biancarosa, and Lina Shanley
When most people think about reading in science, they think of heavy and densely written texts—the kind you find in science textbooks. Although textbooks remain a staple of science education, they—along with laboratory notes and scholarly reports—are notably lacking from the exemplar science texts referenced in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Rather, the Common Core exemplars include excerpts from articles in popular science magazines, manuals, procedural texts, and (at the high school level) primary-source documents (for example, an excerpt from a translation of Euclid's Elements).
With this shift in the types of texts students will encounter in the science classroom, instruction must adapt to help students develop reading skills for comprehending both traditional and nontraditional sources of science literature. For example, the CCSS draw informational texts from the websites of National Geographic, theSmithsonian, Kids Discover, PBS, and Popular Science.
Research suggests that understanding scientific discourse "requires an excellent domain of highly specialized language, discourse, and world knowledge" (Graesser, León, & Otero, 2002, p. 4). In particular, scientific readers need to hone their skills for
- inferential thinking
- activating prior knowledge
- recognizing technical terms, academic language, and scientific vocabulary (e.g., Sutherland, 2008)
- scientific exploration and reasoning
This last point may sound a bit vague, but to read science texts, students must be able to participate in scientific exploration and reasoning. That means creating and interpreting arrays of data and utilizing reasoning that reflects scientific norms and values (Schoenbach & Greenleaf, 2009). In other words, as students read, they are constructing problem models of science texts.
For an example of a problem model, Graesser et al. (2002) discuss developing a situation model about a text describing a person sliding down a hemispheric dome. In this example, in order for students to develop appropriate problem models of this text, they must be able to understand the variables and relations described in the text in terms of position and velocity (e.g., scientific and mathematical knowledge), any forces and Supporting Readers in Science — Whole Child Education:
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ED Pulse Poll Results: What Is the Purpose of Education? — Whole Child Education: THE WHOLE CHILD BLOGED Pulse Poll Results: What Is the Purpose of Education?May 6, 2014 by Whole Child SymposiumPost written by Kit Harris, ASCD ResearchASCD continually seeks to provide solutions to the challenges that face educators of all levels. A recentASCD SmartBrief ED Pulse poll reached out to readers of the