Promoting Scientific Literacy in My Classroom
Science: (n.) the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.
Stressed in the definition above is intellectual and practical activity. The practical piece of this definition is something I will practice a lot in my science classroom in order to drive engagement. First, it is important to design an authentic task for students. That is the main theory behind problem based learning, providing authentic tasks to the students.
In our disciplinary lesson for our literacy class, we designed a PBL unit, having students focus on what type of car crash would result in the least amount of force placed on the driver. This is authentic, because being an 8th grade unit, many of our students are looking to begin driving within the next 2 years. All lectures in a PBL unit are called “workshops” and stem only from what the students need to know as they proceed with the project.
It will also be important to provide appropriate disciplinary texts. In the science classroom, it is common for scientific texts to be quite complicated. There is typically a ton of vocabulary that students may not be familiar with yet, and there is a lot of ‘mumbo jumbo’.
Similarly to the above example from Plaut, it is important that students know the terms, but it is way more important that they understand the concept. Especially today, when we all walk around with google in our pockets and can easily look up terms and vocabulary we may have forgotten.
For example, we are currently studying Mitosis, or cell division, with my 7th grade classroom in my practicuum. There are a ton of terms in this unit: Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, Cytokinesis, Interphase, etc. These terms can become confusing which term refers to what process. However, these terms would mainly be used for rote memorization tests, or to aid in reading a scientific paper later in life. Therefore, in my classroom, I stress knowing the concept over knowing the vocabulary. This is not to downplay the importance of knowing the vocabulary, but after teaching the concepts, I am confident that my students will remember the main objective: That cells come from other cells, and cells replicate by duplicating the chromosomes inside their nucleus.
That being said, it is important to provide a variety of texts so that students can truly grasp meaning. For our unit on mitosis, my CT and I provided a traditional text book at a 7th grade reading level. Most of my classes did fine with this resource, but there were a few of them where I would use one of the many tools available to help decrease the reading level. We also provided this excellent song that a student from Morehouse college in Georgia made in his college classroom.
Not only will different texts be used to present material, but I will also allow students to present different texts as their assessment.
It is also important that I scaffold literary thinking. There are many ways to scaffold literate thinking in the science classroom. I plan on modeling many parts of the scientific method. The first thing I would model would be questioning: “I wonder if this is a reliable source. I notice that it is a .gov site, and that it is a study funded by the government. It seems like an impartial and fair review of the study. This other source seems to be funded by a corporation that has a strong interest in the result… since they are opposite, maybe I should present them both”.
I also plan on having “check-ins” throughout big projects to ensure students are on the right track. The first check-in on any big research project will be a resource check. Not only is it important to know if the students are finding valid information, it is a great opportunity to talk about the importance of reliable sources, and how to determine them as reliable.
Overall, I love this video from Neil de Grasse Tyson, and it sums up nicely what I think about scientific literacy. How do we look at the world? How do we question the world?
