In last week’s blog, we covered the idea of including opportunities for students to practice scientific/STEM writing, which may be new to many. However, writing is such an important facet of literacy and communication, that it is a crucial skill to develop to ensure that students are adequately prepared if they plan to pursue a STEM related career in post-secondary education or otherwise. Along these lines is the idea of developing the student’s literacy toolkit to include proper research (and associated communication) skills. One thing that I noticed between the transition from high school to post-secondary was the expectation that students are (at least somewhat) familiar with academic articles and research. And I also know that I was not that familiar with either. Upon reading my first academic physics research article from a peer-reviewed journal, I was a bit overwhelmed. There were so many sections, fancy words and definitions (…what is an abstract, anyways?) that it was hard to understand what the article was even about. What I’ve learned from my experience is that there are a variety of skills associated with literacy in scientific research, not limited to: the research process itself, learning to pick out key information, summarizing what you’ve read, analyzing sources for legitimacy and content, paraphrasing, proper citations, and creating a bibliography. Some of these are skills that certainly are addressed at the high school level in other courses, such as learning about citations, or learning to identify important information in a written passage. Within science, math, or other STEM courses, these skills present another way to begin the process of increasing literacy. Throughout my education degree, I have learned so much about creating rich tasks for assessment, differentiating the learning process, providing multiple modalities and unique ways for students to show you evidence of their learning. With this in mind, I believe that there are many ways in which aspects of STEM research literacy could be included in the classroom, as instruction or as assessment. Some of these are explored in more detail, below:
From personal experience, reading a scientific article for the first time can be very overwhelming. This literacy strategy involves providing students with an article and guiding them through the process of reading and comprehending its contents. Article choice is important here - it is necessary to spend some time finding articles that are not too complex for students, but they should cater to some sort of research and the findings, in order to mimic the type of articles that will be analyzed at a post-secondary level. If this is one of the first times that a scientific article has been introduced to students, it may be important to ensure that they are guided through the process of analyzing the article, at least for the first time. Including common literacy/reading comprehension strategies at this point may also be very beneficial to students. Check out this article for a list of popular reading strategies that teachers use across curricula. It is important that students’ learning is properly scaffolded during this time - without proper guidance, students may feel overwhelmed with the amount of information that is before them. After going through an example together, provide students with a new article, and have them read / analyze the article individually. Then, in order to gauge their understanding of the content, they may answer some pre-made questions about the article and its content/structure. For example: - What is the question that the researchers are answering? - What did they do to try and answer the question? - What did they find out? - What are their next steps (if any)? These questions describe the standard structure of a scientific article, and represent the important information that a reader should be able to discern as they analyze a given article. 2. Summarizing Similar to an article analysis is the ability of a student to read an article and then summarize what they have read in their own words. This is certainly a skill that is practiced in other subjects, so it should not be new to students. Again, you may want to model what a summary should look like, including going over reading strategies as you would in the previous section. This is also an activity that can be easily scaffolded; if students are very new to reading academic/scientific articles, then they can start by reading and summarizing passages from the textbook in their own words. Then, as they build the skill, they can further extend it to summarizing articles from scientific websites or magazines. After this skill has been sufficiently developed, they can work on summarizing the main points of a research article as well. This strategy ties in very well with the article analysis strategy, above, since they can practice summarizing various aspects of the article including some of the questions outlined above as well. Check out this webpage for a variety of STEM related articles that students can work on summarizing, which have relevant and cool topics, from Minecraft to unicorns. 3. Mini Research Projects This option could be particularly exciting for students as it could be done as more of a performance-task style of assessment. Giving students the freedom to choose their own modality or topic is a good motivator, which will hopefully result in some exciting projects and lots of learning! I would provide students with a list of possible research project areas that correlate within the current unit of study. For example, my students are currently learning about types of energy sources and renewable vs. non-renewable / solar vs. non-solar sources. I might provide them with a list of types of energy sources (hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, etc.) and then let students choose which they would like to explore further, in the form of a question, such as ‘How have solar energy sources become more efficient in the past decade?’ This is a good, all-encompassing project, as it addresses many different facets of literacy in STEM. The research process, summarizing, paraphrasing, bibliographies…really the whole package associated with scientific research, but on a mini-scale. Once again, as this is likely a new process for students, I would provide samples or model papers on which they can base their own. I would also provide a list of legitimate teacher-approved websites that can consult for their research, particularly if they are new to the research process. Summary Researching is subset of several literacy skills (writing, reading comprehension, etc.), and as such, it provides a good basis for developing several skills simultaneously. This is also a great way to get students excited about science. How? Many articles in magazines or webpages are highlighting recent discoveries, new advancements, and modern theories of nearly every aspect of science. Letting students browse articles from a vetted website, or from other reputable sources may be a great way to engage them. TeachThought Staff. (2016). 25 reading strategies that work in every content area. TeachThought. Accessed on November 26, 2020 from https://www.teachthought.com/literacy/25-reading-strategies-that-work-in-every-content-area/
Castagno-Dysart, D., Matera, B., Traver, J. (2019). The importance of instructional scaffolding. Teacher Magazine. Accessed on November 26, 2020 from https://www.teachermagazine.com/au_en/articles/the-importance-of-instructional-scaffolding Science News for Students. (2020). Science news for students. Science News for Students. Accessed on November 26, 2020 from https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org
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