Even after two semesters of studying how to teach scientific
literacy, I, still, cannot give an exact definition. Organizations who write
and create standards and curricula for science courses make some skills more
important than others. Some older standards have put more emphasis on
disciplinary content knowledge over how the scientific information is found.
Standards are changing to put more emphasis on technical and practical science
skills, which expects students to have deeper understanding and knowledge of
scientific concepts. According to the authors we have read this semester,
scientific literacy is competency in the skills that scientists, and engineers,
use to practice science. All of the authors agree on common skills, such as,
observation (and analysis), modeling, revision, and argumentation, as being
necessary to understand and practice science. Some of these skills require
other literacy skills, such as being able to read scientific literature and
being able to write and make explanations and arguments. Scientific literacy
includes many different skills and needs a lot of support to learn and build.
In other classes, we have talked about how to use resources,
such as media, in the classroom. Videos, articles, and the Internet can help
bring student prior knowledge and background knowledge to the foreground, so
lesson can be more meaningful and more attainable. During lessons, these
resources can also give more or alternative representations to help students
understand concepts. It can also be a powerful tool in helping with the
scientific literacy skills, such as modeling. In my own classes, modeling skills
will have to be taught and built upon throughout the year, but as students
become more familiar with modeling, I will use it to teach them other literacy
skills, such as analyzation and explanation, which can help me to assess understanding.
Some authors, such as diSessa, Resier, and Wilensky, say
that computational programming is also a very effective resource to teach
modeling and the other skills. Computational programming is one way to teach
students how to create and revise accurate models. In the article we read this
week, Pratim and Doug argued how other media resources, such as computational
games can be useful in science and math classrooms. Media resources can make
lessons more meaningful and more interesting to students, while teaching them
the skills they need to be literate in science. I would like to incorporate these
computational methods and other modeling methods in my future classrooms.
I like how you noticed that we have talked a lot about modeling but not a lot about games so far. I wonder how much games and modeling overlap, especially with agent based modeling? Is it useful to have students create and run agent based models but also play agent based games that put them in the shoes of a single agent. For example, what would being a sheep in the predator prey model look like? That could be a game. Would it be helpful to student learning?
ReplyDeleteCaitlin, I completely agree with you. I find it hard to easily define scientific literacy in part because it comes into conflict with the standards and what high stakes testing emphasizes. Additionally, the term scientific literacy is still developing and forming because the way science is tested is beginning to change. Thus, I think it is normal and appropriate not to fully know the definition of scientific literacy
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