▶ A close attention to detail
▶ An understanding of how details interconnect to build conceptual understandings
▶ The ability to interpret and synthesize data
Literacy strategies create an infrastructure of supports that allow students to enter into science, rather than do an exercise in memorization and information recall. Instead, stronger literacy strategies provide the necessary skills that support students’ abilities to think like scientists with prereading, during-reading, and postreading experiences that are interconnected to the demands of becoming a young scientist. We believe it is necessary to make use of literacy strategies in a way that supports the thinking of science, and there are many innovative, engaging ways to support that commitment.
The Need for Literacy Instruction
Picture a reader who is just beginning to learn how to read. What behaviors do you see as this student engages with text? What is he or she learning to do first? How is he or she grappling with the challenge of learning how to read? Chances are, you visualize this reader at the beginning stages, working to crack the alphabetic code—breaking apart and sounding out words, one syllable at a time, and likely dealing with simple language and colorful text. The words the student is trying to read are already ones that he or she likely employs in conversation. This student is engaging in growing basic literacy skills—decoding, fluency, and automaticity. During this early phase of learning how to read, comprehension and meaning making almost take a back seat to decoding. The reader is working on the mechanical process of learning to read.
As readers advance beyond the beginning stages of reading and advance in their abilities to read, they become more fluent and able to comprehend a text. At this point, the advanced reader possesses the ability to make meaning from what he or she reads—the process of reading is no longer dedicated to the mechanical process of encoding and decoding a text. Instead, the process of reading is dedicated to learning and thinking. More advanced readers are able to infer from and analyze what they read in a book, as well as what they read in the world, even when they have limited experience with a topic. Such readers possess the critical literacy skills they will need for college and success in the workplace. These critically literate students are ready to take on complex tasks and dive into disciplinary literacy tasks—tasks that are specific to particular subject areas like science.
Now, what about the reader who is somewhere between these two phases—the reader who is not a beginning reader and is not an advanced reader? What about the student who can break the code—he or she can encode and decode—but struggles to apply this information to make new understandings? The reality that we all know and experience in our classrooms is that there are many students who fall into this place along the continuum, and there are many students who leave our high schools without the essential life skill of being critically literate. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results detailed in The Condition of Education 2018 report (McFarland et al., 2018) suggest that only 36 percent of eighth-grade students and 37 percent of twelfth-grade students possess literacy skills at or above the level of proficiency and over 60 percent have not met this readiness benchmark. This means that a majority of students are moving through middle school and high school without developing the literacy skills necessary to be successful in science classrooms. This is the group of students with which we are most concerned in this book. We know that this large group of students requires greater attention and a greater concentration on skill development. Moreover, a specific portion of these students will continue to need support in even basic literacy skill development. It is this portion of our student population that seems to be the conundrum—often these are the students teachers struggle to support.
A science curriculum is often incredibly challenging for students who struggle with their developing literacy skills. Unfortunately, the struggle among many of this group of students is not always transparent even though they make up the majority of students in American classrooms. The graph in figure I.1 (page 6) represents the increasing gap in literacy as students grow up within schools, boldly demonstrating the challenges we must work to solve as educators in schools. In our PLCs, we must all shoulder the responsibility of student literacy and address these alarming statistics.
Research confirms there is a real need for disciplinary literacy instruction in the science classroom. Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan (2008) note the following.
▶ Adolescents in the first quarter of the 21st century read no better—and perhaps worse—than the generations before them.
▶ For many students, the rate of growth toward college readiness actually decreases as students move from eighth to twelfth grade.
▶ American fifteen-year-olds perform worse than their peers from fourteen other countries.
▶ Disciplinary literacy is an essential component of economic and social participation.
▶ Middle and high school students need ongoing literacy instruction because early childhood and elementary instruction do not correlate to later success.
Among the many concerns within collaborative discussions about teaching and learning, literacy continually ranks as one of the most worrisome. In many of our discussions with teachers throughout North America, teachers across academic disciplines express three running concerns: (1) many students struggle with basic literacy skills, (2) many students read and write below grade level, and (3) many students do not know how to complete reading or writing assignments.
Gaps in literacy skills are staggering, and these gaps affect all areas of many students’ education. As students are marched through their schooling, the statistics demonstrate that gaps in literacy increase over the course of many students’ elementary, middle, and high school years. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) reports many students find themselves reading three to six grade levels below their peers, many students struggle mightily to comprehend informational texts, and many students graduate from high school unprepared to enter a college level experience. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) and Michael A. Rebell (2008) further highlight the following statistics, which present significant and long-standing concerns.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress, n.d.
Figure I.1: Percentage distribution of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students across NAEP reading achievement levels.
▶ By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies that are nearly 50 percent greater than those of working-class children, and twice as large as those of children whose families are on welfare.
▶ By the end of fourth grade, African American, Hispanic, and poor students of all races are two years behind their wealthier, predominantly white peers in reading and mathematics. By eighth grade, they have slipped three years behind, and by twelfth grade, four years behind.
▶ Only one in fifty Hispanic and African American seventeen-year-olds can read and gain information from a specialized text (such as the science section of a newspaper) compared to about one in twelve white students.
▶ By the end of high school, African American and Hispanic students’ reading and mathematics skills are roughly the same as those of white students in the eighth grade.
▶ Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, about 90 percent of whites have either completed high school or earned a GED. Among African Americans, the rate is 81 percent; among Hispanics, 63 percent.
▶ African American students are only about 50 percent as likely (and Hispanics about 33 percent as likely) as white students to earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine.
Statistical