Blog #2: Inquiry Project Intro

What are your initial thoughts and ideas about your inquiry topic? What are you beginning ideas about your contribution to the inquiry project? How are you now understanding reading in your discipline?

The focus of my inquiry project is going to be vocabulary. This is because for science, there is a heavy reliance on vocabulary that intimidates or puts students off. In my opinion vocabulary makes up about 65% of biology in a high school classroom and the concepts take up the other 35%. One aspect of vocabulary that I am very interested to incoporate in my classroom is the concept of a word wall. I think that a lot of science teachers disregard things like that because it's a english classroom technique. Also using the word sort activity that we did in class, I think this will help create a relationship between the meaning of words.

Right now my ideas about hot to contribute to the inquiry project aren't concrete. They are more ideas that keep changing as I read. One thing that I've read about is definition map. The purpose is to allow students to define and gain a comprehensive understanding of the words. The students answer three main questions: 1, What is it (How is the word categorized?) 2. What is it like (What are some characteristics of the word?) and 3. What are some examples (what examples can you think of that are related to the word?). Another technique I'm interested in using is Personal clue cards. This is a substitute for looking words up in a chapter and defining the (which I did a lot of in science in high school). Students make mental associations to come up with their personal cards. Mainly I'm hoping to contribute a fresh perspective for students to learn the all important words without pulling teeth and creating meaningful connections so that they don't just learn the words for the test and then forget them.

I've come to understand that reading in my discipline is boring for most people, especially if you can't understand the vocabulary that is being used (see above). However, it is important to be knowledgeable in science content reading because science is a huge part of our lives and will only get larger. A lot the the concepts that are read about in biology are often misrepresented in popular media so it's no wonder vocabulary is so hard to understand with the movie industry butchering terms to suit people's terror of the vocabulary words. Despite my dislike for the way popular media displays some aspects of science, there are books out their that are related to science that are good and make connections to other things you've learned in other contents. Reading is important no matter the content, it may not be enjoyable but it is important.

Blog #1

What are your perceptions of content literacy and the adolescent reader? What are your experiences involving content literacy? What are your initial observations of effective reading in your discipline?

Many students struggle with science content literacy no matter the age or type of science presented. The word "science" has gone from an academic word to a word that invokes fear in many students. There are many reasons for this fear, some justified, others absurd, regardless of the reason for the fear, the point is taht for many students this fear is unjustified.A lot of students are scared of science literacy because they aren't exposed to it and shown that like other subjects there is a language that is represented in these articles and if you can decipher the language, then the rest is easily understood. A lot of published scientists like to use large words to show why they earned a PhD and that can be intimidating to students (this doesn't just happen in science content either). In my opinion as soon as the students see large words, fear sets in and that undeveloped frontal lobe backs it up and they give up without really having started.

My own experiences with science content literacy are limited to either my early years (i.e. picture books) with a large gap until I got to college and declared a science major. I didn't get much exposure to science based articles in high school and only slightly more than that in middle school. Most of my science exposure when I was in those grades came from my own interests and I was the one to pursue the magazines (never journals, I wasn't that brave/nerdy) and occasional book. My science teachers were more concerned with our grades rather than making us read. Once I got to college, they took it mostly for granted that most of the students hadn't read science content literacy and seemed to take it in stride and fill that gap in our education.

My initial observations of effective reading in science would be that many students lack the instruction how to properly dissect the readings to get what they need out of them. They see large science words and immediately blame their lack of knowledge in the fact that they are "bad at science." The other response I see is that many science literature is geared towards small children (to explain natural wonders) or college students (professional scholarly journal articles) with not much between to allow for students to grow. I think that it's important for students to be exposed to science content literacy even though most are not and that even having "baby" books (children books) in the classroom might provide the student who was never exposed to the concepts in the books with answers and clear one more pre-conception that isn't correct. While science articles can be hard to read it is still important to expose children to them and work with them to understand.

Bloggist

I can now officially add bloggist to my list of accomplishments :)