Scientific Literacy

SciCon 2018  
http://www.scicon2018.co.nz/ is the biennial conference of science educators across New Zealand and it was held in Christchurch in the first week of the July school holidays this year.  I love that teachers all over the country spend their term break time going to conferences to learn and share their ideas, to create new and strengthen old networks, and have conversations with each other about learning.  SciCon 2018 was just like this.  One of the kaupapa that seemed to play out over the 4 days was scientific literacy and it's importance in learning experiences for our students.  This is a kaupapa I am passionate about too, so I went to all the keynote speakers and many of the workshops who had this theme in their kōrero.
Johnathan Osborne said in his keynote:

Two years of high school science has more new words in it than learning a new language.

While I knew there was a lot of language in science, and learning it was a key part for students to be successful, I had never really thought about the volume of new words there might be for a student to learn.  It is important that students go beyond just learning vocabulary; vocabulary alone is not enough.  Scientific literacy does need vocab, but students also need to explore and understand how scientific information is created and communicated.  They need to know which examples belong to particular scientific ideas and which examples do not belong.  They need to talk about ideas using learning strategies that promote oral use of language so they can make their own meaning of ideas, before they are required to write about ideas.  They need to hear the language being used and then try using it for themselves.  If we want our students of science to understand science concepts, understand them deeply and not just regurgitate it, we need to let them explore those ideas and what they mean for themselves and what they don't mean too.

Over time, our ideas in science have changed, but some people in society don't believe this is the case, they have not engaged with new information, or didn't understand it when they did engage with it and so old ideas prevail.

Examples:

• Earth is flat ….changing to …. Earth is spherical
• Earth is stationary ….changing to....Earth spins on its axis and moves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit

We also have some crazy ideas in science.  Ideas that take some imagination to explain to someone else and for that person to believe.  How do we explain this to our students when their observations of the world around them is likely to suggest otherwise?  The observation of these ideas can't be viewed from here on Earth in our life time.  The arguments people come up with are based on their on-Earth experiences.  How do we offer experiences that enable people to disassemble their ideas and make new meanings?

Examples:

• The continents were once all grouped together
• We evolved from other species over a long period of time
• The Earth spins to create day and night

All of what we call "knowledge" is actually language, which means that the key to understanding this subject is to understand the language.

 So, how can we go about supporting the learning of the scientific language which is beyond learning vocabulary?

Being aware of the scientific discourse

Teachers need to be aware of the unique features of scientific language and how scientific knowledge is created, used, and communicated.  Some of this is covered by the overarching and unifying strand of the Nature of Science (NZC, 2007).  The Nature of Science (NOS) has a component call "Communicating in Science".  Most of what I share here sits within that part of NOS.

People acquire language as todlers by listening, mimicing, and experimenting orally.  They then begin to connect language visually and finally they read and then write.  We need to offer science students opportunities to follow this pathway too.

Science texts are:

• Lexically dense - lots of academic and science jargon words per sentence
• Polysemy - words that have different meanings in different contexts
• Nominalisations - condensing ideas into one word, sometimes called the "-tion-ification" of words Eg. Pollination, absorption, radiation, deforestation etc. It has the effect of increasing the lexical density too
• Passive voice - where the emphasis is on the object, not the scientist or person
• Multimodal - lots of information is also in charts, graphs, diagrams, chemical and mathematical symbols as well as in text

Osborne had an idea that students "read to learn in science, and learn to read in science".  His wesbite is open source, deliberately, and has a collection of strategies that support students to increase their scientific literacy (http://serpmedia.org/rtls/).  He thinks it is important that actively teach and provide opportunities for students to do all these aspects of developing their literacy in science.  he has a host of activities that support pre-reading, during reading, and post reading thinking and discussion between students.

To help teachers understand the technical language in a piece of text, he recommends using WordSift (https://wordsift.org/).  You add a piece of text to the website and it gives you information about the lexical density.  WordSift is cloud based and free. It presents its information in a wordle style and you can select for various features of the text to be highlighted a different colour. If a text is lexically dense, then you will know that you need to provide strategies to support understanding before, during and post reading.

Osborne also discussed the argument from students that they "need the notes" and had this quote about that which I loved:

Copying notes is the process of giving information from the lecturer to the student without going through the minds of either.

On his website, he has a host of strategies you could offer your students for them to make their own notes including Frayer's Model (http://serpmedia.org/rtls/frayer.html) and Cornell Notes (http://serpmedia.org/rtls/cornell.html)

So, I hear you wondering out loud to yourself "how can I fit this in, I don't have time with some much in the curriculum".  I agree, you can't fit it in.  You will need to justify some things.  I have found that when I began focusing on literacy in science ten years ago, students remembered ideas easier because they had developed their own meaning and their understanding was deeper.  I saved time in my programme because I didn't have to spend as much time on re-teaching ideas and revision at assessment time.  I also began to save time the following year because I didn't have to re-teach as much of the previous year's learning before I moved on to the new learning.  And yes, I did have to leave out a little content in my planning, but I found I was covering it anyway because students felt confident as learners in science and so became more engaged in their learning, asking questions and wanting to take their learning on to that new idea.  Now I don't worry about "not being able to fit" literacy and all the topics in my programme.  These strategies that support literacy are useful regardless of the topic, and so students become fluent in using them.  If you haven't yet taken the leap into deeply supporting scientific literacy, then please do.  Your students will learn deeply, and your programme will be richer, not less.

For all resources shared by keynote speakers and workshop facilitators at SciCon 2018 please go to this website.  I believe it will be available until about September, 2018.     http://www.scicon2018.co.nz/