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.