The topic this week was science literacy and I found this topic to be a great challenge when I first started to teach science. I can teach math, science, or French, therefore I have had a broad range of teaching assignments. In a middle school setting or lower high school levels of science courses, an educator comes across a diverse range of reading levels in each classroom.
I found that some of my high school students had second to fourth grade reading levels which made me ponder as to how I could teach these students to comprehend the science. Through the years, I have found that guided notes and note problems helped the students to read the science for the major concepts. As I go over the information I also concept map with the kids to help them to connect the dots of the key conceps in each section of the chapters in the texts. The problem with typing up guided notes and note problems is that it takes up a lot of time. When I have numerous preps, I cannot focus as much on literacy problems as I can when I have less than four preps.
To assist with writing across the curriculum, I require my students to write up their labs in a bound labbook, and to write a good conclusion paragraph. This conclusion paragraph is supposed to connect the lab to the theory in the classroom. I struggle with this as students seem to want to tell me step by step what they did in the lab rather than use higher level thinking skills. It can take the first nine weeks for it to sink into the minds of many of my students that I am going to take points off for not writing at the level they should be writing. This level is individualistic because of the different literacy levels of my students, so it may take a few weeks before I can determine the students' reading and writing levels.
In summary,the articles that we read reiterated many topics that I learned the hard way through many years of teaching. I am glad that what I learned is in accordance to research.:) I am also grateful that science educators as a whole have recognized the stumbling blocks in science comprehension is caused by literacy problems and we have to improve literacy levels in our schools across the curriculum to help our students become productive members of society.