Teaching Reading in Science

How to Teach Reading in Science

Introduction

Students often come to us having the ability to read, albeit not at the same level. However, reading within the curriculum is different than reading a graphic novel or another piece of fictional work.  Reading non-fiction can often times elicit groans and complaining about the nature of the text. However, students need to be engaged in a productive struggle to read these complex texts within the science curriculum to improve their content literacy. Thusly, the reading and engagement with complex texts should improve their ability to engage in group discourse and writing in the content area. 

Good Readers are: 

• • Mentally engaged

  • Motivated to read and to learn 

  • Persistent in the face of challenge 

  • Socially active around reading tasks 

  • Strategic in monitoring the interactive processes that assist comprehension:

    • Setting goals that shape their reading processes 

    • Monitoring their emerging understanding of texts 

    • Reasoning with texts in valued and discipline-specific ways 

    • Coordinating a variety of comprehension strategies to control the reading process

      (Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., & Murphy, L. (2012). )

Creating a Culture for Reading Science: 

A holistic approach must be used when teaching reading in science.  Because this is often more difficult for students, they need to understand that there are others in the same boat as they are: lost and confused when it comes to reading technical information. A lot of metacognition is incorporated into teaching how to read within the content area.  This is known as the metacognitive conversation. Students are thinking about what they think while or after they read. 

The four areas of reading focus on the metacognitive conversation: 

• • • • Social Dimension

      • Personal Dimension

      • Cognitive Dimension

      • Knowledge-Building Dimension

    (Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., & Murphy, L. (2012). )

    See attached diagram for details about each of the areas.

Ideas

The following reading lesson plans include one or more of these dimensions to the development of the technical reader. 

• • Social Dimension Strategies: 

    • Students' Norms - Students create a list of norms in a Think-Pair-Share that helps facilitate their learning. As a class, the norms are condensed into an agreed upon list by the class.  

    • Teacher's Norms - Similar to building the class norms, students create a reasonable norm list for the teacher to help facilitate learning. As a class, the norms are condensed into an agreed upon list by the class and teacher. 

  • Close reading strategies: 

    • Science in the News (SIN) - See Science in the News Page

  • Summarizing strategies: 

    • The 25 word summary - Students must create a summary of a reading that is exactly 25 words (no more, no less). Students must choose words carefully.  The may not repeat words or use synonyms to fulfill the word number requirement (ex: the very, very large and enormous cow).

  • Building on Schema and Knowledge: 

    • Cartoon Schema - Students are given a cartoon (political or not) with no (or few) words or captions. Students are given prompts to discuss with a partner like: 

      • • What do you think the cartoon means? 

        • Why did the artist create the cartoon? 

        • What evidence or clues did you use? 

  • Metacognitive reading strategies: 

    • SSR 

• • • • Students use reading time to read science fiction or fact. 

      • Use SSR log 

Citations

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., & Murphy, L. (2012). Reading for understanding: how reading apprenticeship improves disciplinary learning in secondary and college classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.