4/6-Elizabeth-the meaning of literacy

I don’t think there is a concrete definition of what “scientific literacy” means because it is multifaceted and still being defined today.  To me, it’s a combination of both understanding and earning about scientific concepts through the scientific methods of investigation and revision (among others) while also being able to explain it to others.  However, it is hard to even begin to embrace this meaning of scientific literacy when standards and high stakes testing emphasize and encourage rote memorization over truly understanding and taking the time to investigate. 

            Media and representations should play a big part in scientific literacies.  This brings a sense of relevancy and familiarity to otherwise foreign topics, a struggle many students face when learning about the sciences.  Relevancy has been a major theme to this course: that students feel as though the concepts are not at all applicable and when made applicable, they are more motivated to learn and understand the material.  Thus, modeling is critical for student success and ideally, should be used in the classroom everyday to various extents. 

I liked what Clark and Sengupta said in their article concerning modeling: that  “developing a good model involves designing representations that capture essential dynamic features of the relationships they describe, but these representations also edit the relationships, by foregrounding some elements and obscuring or omitting others” (3).  They make explicit the important notion that not all modeling is good modeling.  In the beginning of this course, I though any modeling was good and that it would automatically be better for the students.  However, in order for successful modeling to occur, students have to see that ideas and concepts are “dynamic,” ever-changing and directly related/connected to other scientific concepts.

As for modeling inside my classroom-I will definitely include it.  However, I think it will take a few years before I will be able to comfortably use computational models and will probably rely heavily on physical models in the beginning.  I find NetLogo very interesting and would love to learn, and have my students learn, how to code well.  When we went to the school last week, it was amazing to see the students easily making commands and creating their own individual programs with the purpose of them being used in the lower grades.  Thus, I would love to include computational models inside my classroom because there are some interesting chemistry ones, especially for the Ideal Gas Law, but it may take a little bit before I can successfully incorporate it into the classroom.