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 results like these are a stark reminder that we need to focus our attention on the literacy development of students in every corner of our schools. For the grades 6–12 science teacher, the focus on developing students’ abilities to access informational texts should stand out as an important goal, as it is central to reaching science standards, building skills, meeting expectations, and developing young scientists.
In this book, we offer suggestions focused on developing intermediate literacy skills that include building academic vocabulary, self-monitoring comprehension, and knowing how to apply fix-it strategies in order to navigate a text with understanding and the ability to apply this knowledge to a prompted task (Buehl, 2017). These are important skills to attain because students with strong intermediate literacy skills have essentially developed an awareness of their own active comprehension, and they know what to do when comprehension begins to feel shaky. It is vital that, within our disciplines, we don’t jump ahead of intermediate literacy, but instead continually model this phase for our students and provide opportunities for them to practice these skills in a constructive and guided manner.
Due to its focus on literacy in the science classroom, in this book, we regularly refer to the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) and the CCSS ELA (Common Core State Standards for English language arts) that help to articulate the priorities teachers should support in their classrooms. In doing so, we strive to point out the interdependent relationship between literacy skills and the ability to think critically like a scientist.
Disciplinary Literacy
As you gain confidence that students have a good grasp of basic, foundational literacy skills, and as you begin to see them develop more intermediate and advanced literacy skills, you can move forward with tailoring their literacy instruction with an eye toward disciplinary literacy. Even though students will need you to continue modeling the use of academic vocabulary and monitoring their comprehension, they will also be ready to attack complex texts with a disciplinary lens even as they practice building their skills. Who better to lead the way with disciplinary thinking than the experts—our science teachers?
For our purposes, a discipline is a unique expertise—which schools often split into subject-matter divisions such as mathematics, science, ELA, physical education, world languages, fine arts, and so on. Disciplinary literacy focuses on the literacy strategies tailored to a particular academic subject area. This book, as previously noted, focuses on the expertise of science teachers who see the value of integrating literacy strategies into their classrooms.
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What would happen if your team were to gather teachers from every discipline in your school and track the way they each address a reading, writing, and speaking task? Predict how different content-area teachers would approach and work through literacy tasks. What similarities and differences would your team observe among these varied disciplines? |
Because teachers have unique expertise related to their academic field
