Science Literacy
Before diving into what being scientifically literate means to me as a future secondary teacher, take a minute or so to answer a couple questions from this “Are you Science-Literate” quiz -
How did you do? The answer to this is probably directly correlated to how long ago you took a basic biology, physics, and chemistry course. So really, this quiz is solely asking about your content knowledge, not what I would consider scientific literacy. The authors of the article, Freeman and Sankar-Gorton (2015), even start by asking “How much do you know about science?”, which I find highly misleading. In the rest of my writing, I will discuss my belief that scientific literacy is not defined by how much content you know, but rather how being scientifically literate allows you to successfully create and decode science knowledge.
By the time students reach high school level science, their basic and intermediate literacy will likely be very developed. This is crucial because science literacy builds on top of general literacy. In my future classroom, students will achieve this upper level of science literacy by having the ability to dive into inquiry and ask good questions, design and perform novel experiments, decode scientific texts, and know display information correctly for a formal presentation and for the general public. Tang et. al (2014) said, “That is, science knowledge cannot be fully learned unless the learner is a participant in the literary practices of science-the practices involved in using print, images, graphs, tables, and other symbolic systems to represent or access science information, ideas, or understanding” (p. 58). This shows that being literate in science does not mean just having content knowledge. Being literate in science gives students the ability to create scientific knowledge of their own and to interpret scientific knowledge that has been left behind by other scientists.
What makes a good question?
Science is deeply rooted in questioning. It is used to explain the world we live in using reliable, evidence-based theories. It is natural to come up with general questions when we do not understand something. Part of being science literate is knowing how to narrow down those general questions down into a concise, testable scientific question. Questioning should come before reading into topics, as Klaus-Quinlan and Cazier (2009) explained, “Having already generated observations and questions, the students know know why they are reading: to gain information to help them interpret what is happening…” (p. 82). Reading with a question in mind allows you to be critical and look for good information. In the case that there is no good information available to answer the questions, it is up to the students to find their own answers.
Thus, students must know how to answer these questions by designing and performing experiments. Being literate in this sense means being able to choose appropriate methods that either support or reject a claim that answers the scientific question. Students should also be able to evaluate other peoples’ methods that they use to test their own claims. This allows for the ability to distinguish good science from psuedo-science and bad science.
Decoding texts and displaying information
Another important aspect of being scientifically literate is the ability to understand scientific literature. This does not being understanding every paper ever published, rather having a good, personalized technique for breaking down a paper and working towards understanding it. Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) said that “Science texts have a high degree of lexical density, higher than that of either mathematics or history. …These content words are technical terms, which must be deeply learned in order to learn the science behind them.” (p. 53). Therefore, being able to decode this text and make sense of scientific papers allows you to access the wealth of information that is present in scientific journals.
Being able to successfully write about science is just as important as being able to read it. If you design an experiment and discover that a local source of drinking water is highly polluted, you are only partially doing good science. The process of forming your data into a graphical display and sharing your information with others is as important as the experiments you ran. If you just left the data in your notebook and didn’t tell anyone, was the experiment even worth doing? Klaus-Quinlan and Cazier (2009) said “Reading, writing, speaking and listening are as much a part of the authentic work of science as designing experiments or gathering data.” (p. 89). To be scientifically literate you need to know how to write for different audiences. If you were to write a grant proposal to help fund the water source restoration project you would use a different method than if you were telling community members about the problem at a meeting. Being able to be the liaison between the scientific community and the public is an indispensable component of scientific literacy.
Science Literacy is transferable
Being science-literate in my future classroom will have little to do with content knowledge and mainly be achieved by the skills I have outlined in this writing: asking good questions, designing and performing experiments, and being able to read, write, and present science in many contexts. If you base this literacy only on content knowledge, most students would have no use for anything they learn in high school. Using my definition of science literacy, students will be able to integrate what they learn in my classes to be applicable in their everyday life, whether they go on to pursue science as a career or not.
References
Freeman, D., & Sankar-Gorton, E. (2015, December 01). Are You Science Literate? Take Our Quiz And Find Out. Retrieved June 11, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/are-you-science-literate-take-our-quiz-and-find-out_us_5620117ce4b069b4e1fb70e3
Klaus-Quinlan, M., and Cazier, J. 2009. The scientist in the classroom: the place of literacy within scientific inquiry. In The right to literacy in secondary schools: creating a culture of thinking. Danvers, MA: Teachers College Press.
McMahon, M., & Wallace, O. (2017, May 23). What is Stoichiometry? Retrieved June 11, 2017, from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-stoichiometry.htm
Shanahan, T., and Shanahan C. 2008. Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents, rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59.
Tang, K., Tighe, S. C., & Moje, E. B. 2014. Literacy in the Science Classroom. In Teaching Dilemmas and Solutions in Content-Area Literacy Grades 6–12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
