After reading the article “Science and Literacy Tools for Life” by Marlene Their, I thought about the various strategies we have tried in our lowest level classes in all disciplines to bring up our students’ reading levels. For a while we used a computer reading program which seemed to build their reading fluency and comprehension skills within that context, but failed to transfer over to reading in the various content areas. Last year we began using a program that has students read short passages (in a book, not on the computer) related to each specific content area (science, history, etc.) and answer different types of questions about the readings. The jury is still out as to whether or not this program has made a difference. We might have burned the students out, though, because many of them were spending one day a week in each of possibly three classes just focusing on reading passages. I lost an entire day each week of science content time. Next year we are using the same program, but less frequently. We will see what happens.
I agree with the article that my “primary task as a science educator is to help students master science concepts, and processes” and that my “secondary task is to help students improve their language skills within the context of science.” I can see how the three strategies the article discusses, performance expectations for students, explicit teaching strategies that support inquiry-based learning, and student metacognition strategies support these tasks. I feel like I employ such strategies or similar ones intuitively without putting a name on them, but I do benefit from seeing it in writing.
One repeated point the article makes resonates well with my own philosophy on education: students need to “take charge of their own learning.” I agree that we as educators need to guide students to do just that.
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