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Re: [Phys-L] Reading Logs -- and Textbook Comprehension



The blog experiments show that you need contextual knowledge of the subject in order to understand what is going on. Whether it is baseball, cricket, chemistry, or medicine, someone who knows nothing about the subject cannot answer the questions, but the literate person who reads them carefully can decipher some aspects of the subject but probably not what a person cognizant of the subject could get from the reading. It shows that I couldn't read an English sports page about cricket and the Englishman couldn't understand the article on a baseball game. (an aside: the baseball anecdote doesn't say anything about the runner having to keep his foot on the bag before running so that question can't be asked unless the description as we saw here left that part out) There were some things an articulate person could comprehend about the medical problem from the non-medical vocabulary in the description, but unless you are studying medicine or physiology you wouldn't be expected to know the rest of the description. In the chemistry description the questions are straightforward. This doesn't require reading comprehension at all, simply a knowledge of the chemical involved. If you don't know the information you cannot answer any of the questions.
This blog simply demonstrates that context and the culture one lives in determines the understanding of a topic. So, in fact this doesn't demonstrate anything about why students cannot read science books.

Conclusion: this blog only confuses the discussion of why students cannot read science books.


On Sep 25, 2015, at 4:55 PM, Rick Nelson wrote:

For a quick exercise in why students cannot read science textbooks with
comprehension, try blog posts 3 and 4 at:

http://chemreview.net/blog/?p=65

Also see the short and inexpensive paperback "The Knowledge Deficit" by
E. D. Hirsch.

What reading comprehension studies say is: To read with
comprehension (and to answer questions on a well-structured topic
intelligently), first you need to memorize extensive background on the
topic.
Science says that beyond the data in a problem, you can only reason with
elements of knowledge
that are well-organized in long-term memory.

The blog post may (or may not) demonstrate this.

-- rick nelson
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