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

Abstract

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.