In his Chemed-L <http://mailer.uwf.edu/archives/chemed-l.html> post
"Reading Science Texts," high-school chemistry teacher John Mackin
(2004) wrote [bracketed by lines "MMMMM. . . . .":
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As I review this almost-completed year, I recognize that some of my
students came to chemistry class with limited abilities to learn
from a science textbook. This seems to be a more prevalent problem
than in previous years. Several questions come to mind.
1. Are others noticing this trend?
2. Are there any excellent resources available to teach students how
to extract information from science texts?
3. Does anyone know of a pre-test to assess a student's ability to
learn from a science text?
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Mackin's post stimulated 5 Chemed-L responses. Most answered "Yes" to
Mackin's Question #1. None substantively answered Mackin's Question
#3. There were three useful responses to Mackin's Question #2:
a. Don McQuarrie wrote "you might use some of the skills taught in
[Tovani & Keene (2000)],
b. Bonnie Wolfe Bloom wrote: "Holt Science has a new workbook - we're
planning on using it with our 9th and 10th grade students for the
first time next year - called "Skills Workshop: Reading in the
Content Area." Teachers are excited about trying it . . ."
c. Christopher Klug wrote: ". . .there's a technique . . . called
"SQ3R" which stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review.
The idea being you skim what you'll read, come up with some key
questions that will be answered (based on the section headings,
picture captions, etc.), actually read the section, go back and
answer the questions you felt would be answered, and then a day or
two later for review look at the questions, and try to answer them -
which you can check with the answers you wrote after the reading."
A similar thread "Reading Comprehension" was initiated on the
AP-Physics discussion list
<http://lyris.collegeboard.com/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?site=collegeboard&enter=ap-physics>,
by Wayne Mullins in his post of 18 Jun 2004 11:09:22 EDT titled
"Reading comprehension and word problems." Wayne wrote: ". . .
reading comprehension is significant to our area of learning. I wish
more college professors were aware of this problem. Most of them
automatically assume poor math skills. The biggest red flag on
identifying a student who is having reading problems... 'I understand
the concepts but am having trouble getting started on this problem.' "
A tangentially related thread "Expert Problem Solving" has been
active on Math-Learn <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/math-learn/>. On
Jun 26, 2004 9:35 am John Texas Clement wrote: "From a developmental
point of view the best explanation [that test results suggest that
minority children on average have lower "Math g or IQ"] is that the
minority group does not experience the same range of external
stimulations that promote brain growth. Such things as reading to
children, taking them to interesting places, talking to them about
the world ... all have an influence."
Along such lines, the insightful chemistry educator Henry Bent(1989)
penned a classic (but evidently unpublished) "Ode to English." Bent
wrote:
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Science, briefly put is applied logic . . . to become a scientist one
needs a good memory . . . and a logical mind . . . therefore the
door to science in contemporary America is closed to many Americans.
For science for many Americans has an overwhelming concentration of
consequentlies, hences, thuses, and therefores. [The] latent ability
for logical thought has to be nurtured . . . to acquire a logical
mind, a baby needs to be surrounded by cultured minds that constantly
use in the baby's presence a logical system that describes the baby's
daily experience. Needed, in other words, are early, extensive
exposures to one of cultures standard mother tongues. Such
experiences are necessary to open the door to careers in science. And
they may be sufficient . . . . Mother-tongue deficiency (MTD) is a
crippling deficiency in a science-based society. It's cruel
punishment to grow up with MTD in a culture where much highly
rewarding work requires immense amounts of logic. Every infant by
birth should have the right to be read to every night. For
development of mother tongue fluency doesn't begin in a school's
first grade. It begins in life's first year. Head start programs do
work. . . . To free America of chemistry conniptions, physics
floundering, and math anxiety ...[Bent had in mind the cartoon by
Gary Larsen included in Hake (1989) that I had sent to him]. . . and
more serious symptoms of MTD, America needs to provide every child
with its birth right and a fundamental freedom: the right to
mother-tongue fluency and (thus) the freedom to choose nearly any
career in life, even a career in science. An America that could
produce many Ph.D's in physics from any minority in its population
would be a more American America for all Americans.
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Are college professors unaware of reading comprehension problems as
implied by Wayne Mullins? At least one college professor, Henry Bent,
IS aware. Another who was aware and went on to become a professor at
Dartmouth was the virtually forgotten educational pioneer Louis Paul
Benezet (1935/36), superintendent of schools in Manchester, New
Hampshire in the 1930's. Regarding Benezet's work, Mahajan and Hake
(2000) wrote:
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Students in Manchester, New Hampshire were not subjected to
arithmetic algorithms until grade 6. In earlier grades they read,
invented, and discussed stories and problems; estimated lengths,
heights, and areas; and enjoyed finding and interpreting numbers
relevant to their lives. In grade 6, with 4 months of formal
training, they caught up to the regular students in algorithmic
ability, and were far ahead in general numeracy and in the verbal,
semantic, and problem-solving skills they had practiced for the five
years before." We conjecture that implementation of the "Benezet
Method" in early grades would drastically improve the effectiveness
of high-school and university physics, science, and math instruction.
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Is there currently any research and development on students reading
comprehension of science/math texts"? A Google
<http://www.google.com/> search for ["reading comprehension" "science
texts"] (without the square brackets) yielded 470 hits, among the
early hits were: Discourse Processes (2004), Graesser(2004), R.
Golden (2004), S. Golden (2004), McNamara (2004), RAND (2002) [with a
good set of references at
<http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1465/MR1465.refs.pdf> (88KB),
Scott (2002), and WestEd (2004).
Similar Googling for ["reading comprehension" "math texts"] yielded 165 hits.
The above references for science texts appear to be due to
psychologists, cognitive scientists, and education specialists. The
reading comprehension area appears to be sadly neglected by education
researchers in disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and
mathematics [please correct me if I'm wrong].
REFERENCES
Benezet, L.P. 1935-1936. The teaching of arithmetic I, II, III: The
story of an experiment, "Journal of the National Education
Association" 24(8), 241-244 (1935); 24(9), 301-303 (1935); 25(1), 7-8
(1936). The articles were (a) reprinted in the "Humanistic
Mathematics Newsletter" #6: 2-14 (May 1991); (b) placed on the web
along with other Benezetia at the Benezet Centre, online at
<http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sanjoy/benezet/>. See also Mahajan & Hake
(2000).
Bent, H. 1989. "Provocative Opinion: Americanizing America Through
Education for Science? An Ode to English," intended for the J. of
Chemical Education but unpublished?
"Discourse Processes." 2004. Online at
<http://www.psyc.memphis.edu/ST&D/ST&D.htm>, edited by A. Graesser,
official journal of "The Society for Text and Discourse."
Graesser, A. 2004. University of Memphis. Homepage
<http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/home/graesser/>: "Dr.
Graesser's primary research interests are in cognitive science and
discourse processing. More specific interests include knowledge
representation, question asking and answering, tutoring, text
comprehension, inference generation, conversation, reading,
education, memory, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and
human-computer interaction. He is currently editor of the journal
Discourse Processes. In addition to publishing nearly 300 articles in
journals, books, and conference proceedings, he has written 2 books
and has edited 8 books (the most recent one being the Handbook of
Discourse Processes)."
Golden, R. 2004. University of Texas at Dallas. Webpages at
<http://www.utdallas.edu/~golden/>,
<http://www.utdallas.edu/~golden/ARCADEoverview.html>: "Dr. Golden .
. . teaches special courses in the area of Text Comprehension, and
Probabilistic Models of Natural Language Understanding (Spring 2003).
. . in collaboration with his graduate students, [he is] pursuing
on-going research . . . . of understanding human text comprehension
and memory processes. . . . We are developing a brand-new web-based
artificial intelligence system called ARCADE (Automatized Reading
Comprehension and Diagnostic Evaluation) which works in a manner
similar to that of a human expert reading specialist. The ARCADE
system works by having children log on to a particular web site. The
children are asked to read narrative stories and science texts and
are asked to type answers to some questions about the texts. The
children are encouraged to type their answers in any format they
choose. Such "essay responses" are important since they can reveal
aspects of children's thinking styles which may not be uncovered in
standardized testing.á ARCADE then automatically groups children with
similar thinking styles together and provides the classroom teacher
with suggested customized group-specific teaching strategies for each
group. Thus, the ARCADE system is designed to improve the quality of
reading comprehension instruction for all children in the classroom.
Golden, S. 2004. University of Illinois at Chicago. Homepage at
<http://litd.psch.uic.edu/people/us/goldman/>: "[Her] current
research activities focus on the psychological processes involved in
how people understand and learn from text, discourse, multimedia, and
conversation (face to face and online)."
Hake, R.R. 1989. "The Science Illiteracy Crisis: A Challenge for the
University: An Annotated Interweaving of Classic Themes and Original
Work Intended as a Libretto for a Wagnerian Musical Drama in Thirteen
Acts," unpublished precursor to Hake (2000). The leitmotiv: "The road
to U.S. science literacy begins with effective university science
courses for pre-college teachers." The opera dramatizes the fact that
the failure of universities throughout the universe to properly
educate pre-college teachers is responsible for our failure to
observe any signs of either terrestrial or extraterrestrial
intelligence.
Hake, R.R. 2000. "The General Population's Ignorance of Science
Related Societal Issues: A Challenge for the University," AAPT
Announcer 30(2): 105; online as ref. 11 at
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>.
McNamara, D. 2004. University of Memphis. Homepage at
<http://csep.psyc.memphis.edu/mcnamara/res.htm>: "The majority of her
current research concerns text comprehension. One focus of that
research (funded by NSF IERI) examines effects of students' reading
strategies on science course performance. The overarching goal of the
IERI project is to develop methods to improve students' use of
reading strategies."
RAND. 2002. "Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in
Reading Comprehension," online at
<http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1465/>. The lead author is
Catherine Snow
<http://hugse9.harvard.edu/gsedata/Resource_pkg.profile?vperson_id=329>
of the Harvard Graduate School of Education See also the RAND news
release at <http://www.rand.org/news/press.02/reading.html>:
"Considerable research has been directed at issues of reading
comprehension, but those research efforts have been neither
systematic nor interconnected," the study says. "Thus, when a
sixth-grade teacher turns to published research with the question
'What should I do with my students who don't understand their history
texts or can't learn from reading science texts?' no consensus answer
is available."