I find that my students often have a difficult time reading scientific materials, labs, and their textbook. Often their written lab reports, essay anwers, and special reports are often full of grammatical erros and are lacking good explanations. They comment that this is biology class and not english class, so they don't have to use all the skills that they have learned in other classes. I agree with the statement from the Science and Literacy Tools for Life article when it says " Your primary task as a sceince educator is to help students master science concepts and processes. Your secondary task is to help students improve their language skills within the context of science, because all teachers need to support literacy within the context of their discipline." I am always looking for ways to make by students better readers and writters.
The article expresses several ways to work on increasing literacy. Sharing performance expectations for students, using explicit teaching strategies, and metacognition. Letting my students know what I expect is a step that I always do with my students. I find that it is so important for them to know what to expect and for them to know what I expect from them. One area I could work on is different teaching strategies. The Write as You Read Science is one method and I would like to look for other strategies. I like to introduce my students to the key ideas and words before they read a passage, but I would like to try other ideas mentioned in the article. Writing narrative procedures and lab reports is one way I could add a metacognitive strategy to my labs. Doing a metacognive conversation to solve a problem is another strategy to increase metacognition .
In the Common Core Literacy Standards for Science, the integration of knowledge and Ideas standards is one that stands out for me. I thinking translating quanitiative or technical information in words into tables and charts is critical for science students. Comparing and contrasting information is another important skill that I work on with my students.
Joy, you mentioned that you work on compare/contrast with your students. I attended an educational behavior conference last week and one of the presenters talked about this very issue. She taught us the reasons why we need to teach skills such as compare/contrast at all levels, even middle school and high school. We can not assume that they already know this skill. She gave us several strategies on how to teach it, but I was wondering if you would share some strategies that you use to teach it... Thanks!
ReplyDeleteShannon
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ReplyDeleteHi Shannon,
ReplyDeleteI often have the students make some sort of visual organizer (chart, concept map) to show how things are the same or different. For example: During our biochemistry unit, they make a chart comparing and contrasting carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. They have a column for elements that the compound is made up of (lots of common elements), function, monomer, and example.