An approach to teaching it
Jacqueline is purchasing her first car and feels torn as she balances
conflicting desires and messages. She yearns to be seated behind the
wheel of a stylish vehicle but is also confronted by advertising messages
that claim "best fuel economy for your money!" and "great for the
environment!“
With her modest budget, Jacqueline knows she must consider the cost of
routine maintenance and fuel. She also cares about how the fuel
emissions of different brands of cars will affect air quality and the
environment.
Every day, the need to make decisions related to science confronts young
people. Although buying a car might seem to be a financial or lifestyle
issue, the choice connects to environmental science. Fortunately,
Jacqueline has practiced solving problems, analyzing data, and making
informed, data-driven decisions in her science classes; and she
understands that her decisions today can affect the environment she will
live in tomorrow.
We might say Jacqueline is critically literate in science, meaning she has
the ability to read, write, think, and talk about real-world science issues
(Lapp & Fisher, 2010).
Over the last 10 years the OECD has developed and refined its definition of
scientific literacy. It started off as:
“………the capacity to use scientific knowledge, to identify questions and to draw
evidence-based conclusions in order to understand and help make decisions about
the natural world and the changes made to it through human activity.” (OECD, 2000,
2003).
In 2006 scientific knowledge was split into two types “knowledge of science” and
“knowledge about science”
also included was the knowledge about the relationship between
science and technology
In 2015 “…….the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of
science, as a reflective citizen” has been added to the definition .
The knowledge about science has been further split into procedural knowledge and
epistemic knowledge.
Finally, the contexts for assessment in PISA 2015 have been changed from ‘Personal,
Social and Global’ in the 2006 Assessment to ‘Personal, Local/National and Global’ to
make the headings more coherent.
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What does being
scientifically literate
mean?
It means being able to:
Explain phenomena scientifically
Including recognising, offer and evaluate explanations for a range of
natural and technological phenomena
Evaluate and design scientific enquiry
Suggest ways of investigating questions which are asked scientifically,
design experiments in a very scientific way and evaluate whether the
experiments are fair, and lead to valid conclusions
Interpret data and evidence scientifically
Analyse and evaluate data, claims and arguments in a variety of
representations and draw appropriate scientific conclusions.
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Types of scientific knowledge
Reasons why students may not be
effective scientific readers:
• Unfamiliar vocabulary
• Reading age of the text too high
compared to reading age of the average
student.
• Lack of wider subject knowledge that
allows text to be put into context and
linked to other topics.
• Lack of confidence (or lack of a
strategy) when making sense of data.
Teach students to read like scientists.
To develop deeper comprehension, it's not enough for students
to merely have a piece of text to read. They must also develop
the ability to read and think like scientists. This means
developing strategies for reading scientific writing and building
a deep understanding of related vocabulary.
One of the best ways for teachers to help students learn how to
comprehend a science text is to model the thinking that occurs
while reading graphs, charts, data tables, and data analysis
sections. Proficient science readers will read the text that
correlates to a table of data, for example, and then study the
table, looking for features like units of measure, data range
values, and column titles. They will then look back at the text to
reread, or continue reading, in an effort to connect this
information to the text.
More than just comprehension
• Traditionally GCSE papers have always included
questions that are at least in part
comprehension based.
• Students can be well trained to look at the
information given in the question and pick out
the word/sentence/item of data that answers
the question.
• They often struggle to spot the point at which
the question begins to examine their wider
knowledge and requires more than ‘spot the
correct answer’.
Getting students to ask questions of the
text, not just answer questions about the
text.
As teachers, if we read a piece of text (with the intention of
producing a comprehension type activity) then we are often looking
out for some of the following:
1. Links between pieces of information in the text.
2. Links between the text and other areas of scientific knowledge
that we can reasonably ask a question about. (Content
knowledge)
3. Links between the text and its relation to wider aspects of
scientific methods (procedural knowledge) or the wider impact
of science (epistemic knowledge).
4. Data that can be used for calculation or evaluation.
If we can train students to read text in this way then this
is a significant step to improving their scientific literacy.
Content knowledge – how does this link
to my knowledge of other areas of
science?
Procedural knowledge – how does this
link to how scientists use data to come
up with new ideas?
Name of
topic here
Epistemic knowledge – how does this
link to the impact of science on the
world?
Data – how could the data given in the
text be used to calculate new
information? How could I check its
reliability?