By Gary Scott
Originally published in California Classroom Science, November/December 2000
Reprinted by permission of the California Science Teachers Association (http://www.cascience.org")
As part of my secondary science coordinator duties, I have attempted to keep my fingers on the heartbeat of what high school science teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District think are the important instructional issues confronting them. One of the issues that has emerged over the past five years is the extent to which they are able to help their students make sense of the written material they assign their students to read in class or as homework.
As you might expect, teachers have become increasingly concerned with their students' inability to make sense of reading assignments.
Compounding this problem are the science texts that teachers require their students to read. Evaluations of middle school science and high school biology texts conducted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Project 2061 brought to light their inadequacies. But even if the teachers had exemplary materials, students' reading comprehension would still be an issue.
I am working with two high school classes once or twice a week. One class is a ninth grade integrated science class and the other is an AP Environmental Science class. Clearly the ninth graders needed help, but the teacher I am collaborating with decided after a couple of weeks' work with his ninth graders that his AP students could benefit from the program. In both classes the first thing we did was to set personal and social norms for the program. Students had to be assured that no one would ridicule them for anything they revealed about their reading problems. I modeled this by using a think-aloud activity in which I read aloud from some unfamiliar source, but stopped and described what came to mind, including what wasn't clear. Showing students that all readers struggle at times, depending on the familiarity with material and other factors, makes it clear that reading comprehension is really like problem solving.
In fact, the program promotes literacy from a reading apprenticeship perspective in which readers are continually involved in a problem-solving process. Their publication, Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms, has many specific strategies to help adolescent readers, and since I have just started teaching it I have only used a few. In future articles I will comment on the progress of this valuable program.
