William G. Holliday

A Balanced Approach To Science Inquiry Teaching

Good science inquiry teaching in the classroom often means many things to practitioners including less teacher intervention, less expository teaching, less explicit instruction, less direct teaching, or fewer teacher explanations. Researchers and other scholars commenting to teachers don’t mean to leave this false, unbalanced impression: Less explicit teaching is better inquiry teaching, by definition (Harris, & Graham, 2000). But reading portions of the National Research Council’s (1996a) National Science Education Standards and numerous science method textbooks probably suggest to too many teachers that science inquiry teaching normally occurs: • When teachers say very little about the meanings of concepts, • When teachers use implicit (indirect) rather than explicit (direct) approaches, • When students discover a large proportion of school science on their own; and • When students figure out for themselves how to grapple with problems and construct knowledge while engaging in, for example, project-based activities.

Teaching Science Reading Comprehension: A Realistic, Research-Based Approach

Our focus is a topic not often discussed in science education: reading. We argue that it should be front and centre. This chapter is intended for science educators on the front lines of education, whether serving as teachers in the classroom, as curriculum developers or as science curriculum administrators. Here, we first describe some research-based guidelines for teaching science reading comprehension. Teaching reading comprehension to science classes means teaching students – who can already read, that is, decode (i.e. pronounce or ‘sound out’) words – ‘a few’ reading comprehension strategies. In subsequent sections, we provide a more detailed description of approaches linked to students’ prior knowledge, their motivation, and the methods of teacher modelling. Explicitly explaining a strategy to students must be integrated with teachers modelling, as extensively illustrated. Teachers doing so describe and illustrate in front of a class how they apply a selected strategy when reading a short passage of science text. If science teachers take valuable class time to teach a few reading comprehension strategies, students are likely to learn more science from texts, perform better on verbally-loaded examinations and outperform other neglected learners in future science courses and in understanding science later in life. Research consistently suggests that hoping that students will ‘naturally discover’ how to comprehend informational texts is a sure-fire way, at best, of delaying students’ abilities to extract meaning (i.e. comprehension) from science texts. The unsystematic trial-and-error methods of the past, with their unguided, independent and inefficient ‘naturally discover’ methods, forces students to rely on fend-for-yourself approaches. Such approaches are most harmful to less-academic students, according to the research. Teachers often make the mistake of assuming that students learned informational science reading strategies in elementary school.

1994 Special Issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching on: Reading, Writing, and Science Understanding

Focus Learning science through the activities of science reading and writing calls for a complex, interrelated process of meaning making and problem solving rather than a simplistic, unidirectional process of meaning taking and rote recitation. This 1994 Special Issue of JRST is intended to stimulate collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiries that will contribute to a better understanding of how print-based language arts (reading and writing) influence science learning. This early call for papers is provided to encourage researchers to conduct investigations targeted specifically for this 1994 special issue.