The same skills that make good scientists also make good readers: engaging prior knowledge, forming hypotheses, establishing plans, evaluating understanding, determining the relative importance of information, describing patterns, comparing and contrasting, making inferences, drawing conclusions, generalizing, evaluating sources, and so on.
Peter Armbruster
I am interested in looking at the overlap of inquiry, scientific literacy, and content-area literacy. While student teaching, I examined how I use reading, writing, and other literacy activities to support my students learning of content.
What I’m Reading:
The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research: Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn Through Practitioner Inquiry
Front-Page Science: Engaging Teens in Science Literacy
Writing Science: Literacy And Discursive Power
An excerpt from my Masters’ Thesis:
Students were learning content through inquiry, what I wanted to study was how else they learned and how I knew they were learning. This question resonated particularly with me as a way to ensure my students were learning and being assessed through multiple modalities. Students engage in the inquiry, puzzling and problem solving, create an experiment or a situation that answers their question, and then puts that answer in a form that can be seen by all. Inquiry learning is too often invisible, and adding the literacy component makes the understanding transparent.
My thesis can be read in it’s entirety here.