Assessment in Education: April 2017

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Using Graphic Organizers for Vocabulary Development

Learning vocabulary is a key component of developing literacy skills. If a student doesn’t know the vocabulary relevant to a text, he or she will have difficulty comprehending what they are reading (McLaughlin, 2015). While most teachers would agree that this is true, the approaches teachers take to learning vocabulary are often misguided. According to current research, learning vocabulary via traditional methods, such as writing definitions and taking weekly vocabulary quizzes, is not as effective as utilizing methods that require students to use words in a variety of contexts, discuss their meanings, and consider how the words relate to course concepts (Anderson & Nagy, 1992; McLaughlin, 2015). Many of these alternative methods are graphic organizers, visual representations of ideas that promote vocabulary development (McLaughlin, 2015). Julie and I embraced these methods by selecting three terms/concepts used in the articles we’ve discussed over the past three weeks and discussing which graphic organizers would best help our students understand these terms.

When choosing three terms/concepts for analysis, Julie and I tried to find terms that were important in each of our three articles, because these terms would therefore be the most relevant to climate change as a whole. We also tried to choose one term that was emphasized in each of the articles we discussed, but we were flexible with this criterion. After narrowing down our search to about six concepts, Julie and I selected the three that we felt were most crucial to understanding climate change. The three terms/concepts Julie and I selected for this analysis were: historical evidence of temperature change, greenhouse gases, and climate-induced weather changes. Historical evidence of temperature change was the primary topic of our first article, titled Paintings, sunspots and frost fairs: Rethinking the Little Ice Age, but was a concept acknowledged by each of our articles (Royal Astronomical Society, 2017). The researchers who contributed to this first article compared modern, sophisticated methods of temperature measurement to historical evidence including sunspot numbers, volcanic eruptions, reports of frost fairs, artwork, and biological proxies such as tree rings and insect records. Julie and I felt that this was an important concept to discuss because it shows students that historical records of temperature can be incomplete, biased, and sometimes misleading. Scientists studying temperature change over time must use a variety of sources to get the clearest picture of historical climate change, and sometimes new technologies, such as isotope samples from Antarctic ice cores, can shed light on previously held notions.

The second concept we chose was the phrase “greenhouse gases.” We initially considered selecting “ozone” as our second term, because that was the primary topic of our second article, The Ozone Hole Was Super Scary, So What Happened To It? (Blakemore, 2016). However, greenhouse gases were discussed in every article we read, and we thought this more broad topic would generate a more effective graphic organizer than the term ozone, which may be too specific to make an organizer for. Furthermore, students in any introductory biology class must understand greenhouse gases in order to understand climate change as a whole, so using a vocabulary strengthening activity to teach this term could be especially helpful.

The third concept Julie and I selected was climate-induced weather changes. Truthfully, we would have selected ocean warming as a topic for this week’s discussion, but Julie and I already made graphic organizers as our extension strategies last week, so we decided to mix things up with a slightly different topic. Earth's oceans are warming 13% faster than thought, and accelerating, the third article Julie and I analyzed, reported that the warming of the Earth’s oceans was causing weather patterns to change, leading to events such as floods and hurricanes (Abraham, 2017). Our other articles also touched upon the effects global warming has and will have on weather patterns. Global warming is a topic discussed in every environmental studies class, but discussing the causes of global warming, the effects is has on weather, and the potential solutions to those weather events ties in nicely with the standards students are expected to meet for this biology unit. Therefore, we felt that a graphic organizer would greatly help students organize their thoughts with respect to how global warming affects weather.

Graphic organizers are useful for developing students’ vocabularies because the visual designs aid students’ memory, completing the graphics in groups promotes discussion of the concepts, and generating graphic organizers forces students to summarize the material by selecting key points (McLaughlin, 2015). In our discipline, biology, there are a few graphic organizers in particular that are useful. Semantic maps are recommended by McLaughlin (2015) because they can be used before, during, and after reading. They help teachers assess the prior knowledge level of their students, and they can be revisited to add more information or write summaries. Similarly, concept of definition maps can be used before, during, and after reading, and are useful for helping students make connections between their prior knowledge and new topics (McLaughlin, 2015). Julie and I used a concept of definition map to summarize the key concepts of ocean warming last week, and found it very useful for remembering the most important information of the topic. As a biology student, I used Venn diagrams frequently, as biology involves comparing the structures and functions of many terms, and Venn diagrams are great for discussing similarities and differences (McLaughlin, 2015). For example, I’ve seen Venn diagrams used in my field experience to compare prokaryotes and eukaryotes, animal cells and plant cells, and the processes of mitosis and meiosis. While there are many other types of graphic organizers that could be used in biology classes, these few in particular, as well as the strategies Julie and I selected that are outlined below, stand out as those that would be most helpful for students.

The three graphic organizers Julie and I chose as our favorites were semantic maps, the Frayer Model, and Science Memory Bubbles. Most graphic organizers are quite similar, and having already used concept of definition maps last week, Julie and I selected these three because they provide great flexibility for teachers. For example, semantic maps have a freeform design that depends on student responses (McLaughlin, 2015). Therefore, we felt that this type of graphic organizer would work well with our first concept, historical evidence of temperature change, because this concept is a bit open-ended, and would foster great classroom discussions as students complete their maps somewhat differently. In this case, the teacher would choose the topic that lies in the center of the map, historical evidence of temperature change, and students would write in the surrounding bubbles as they read (McLaughlin, 2015). Responses that students could write around the center bubble include sunspot numbers, volcanic eruptions, reports of human uses of land, artwork, literature, actual temperature records, and biological proxies such as tree rings and insect records. After students complete their maps individually or in groups, students can reflect on their maps as study tools, because the maps organize the key points of the unit. Going forward, Julie and felt that this technique lends itself to scaffolding quite nicely. Initially, a teacher may have to provide students more guidance with this open-ended graphic organizer, but as students become more familiar with the technique, the teachers can take a step back and allow students more control over their learning.

The other two graphic organizers we chose are a little more rigid, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These techniques provide a concrete way for students to organize their thoughts about less open-ended concepts. For our second term, greenhouse gases, Julie and I chose the Frayer model as our graphic organizer. We both loved the Frayer model when we read about it, and thought greenhouse gases was the term that best fit this technique. The Frayer model prompts students to understand words within the context of a reading by defining the word, describing its characteristics, and listing examples and nonexamples of the word (Richardson, n.d.). This technique works well for individual words, and greenhouse gases was the most important term from any of our articles. Lastly, Julie and I decided to use a Science Memory Bubble to describe climate-induced weather changes. Buehl (2014) describes the strategy of using History Memory Bubbles, but Julie was inspired to adapt this technique to science after seeing her mentor teacher do something similar. This strategy requires students to put information into the context of larger ideas by filling in bubbles for who/what the concept is, as well as the problems, solutions, and outcomes of that phenomenon (Buehl, 2014). We thought this technique would work quite well with climate-induced weather change, as the problem/solution and concept/definition frames were the two text frames most heavily used in the article most relevant to this concept. For her blog, Julie chose the Science Memory Bubble and the concept of climate-induced weather changes, and allowed me to choose between the other two options.

The graphic organizer I chose to specifically model was the Frayer Model for the term greenhouse gases. The Frayer Model is useful for defining unfamiliar vocabulary terms (Richardson, n.d.). This is done by placing the vocabulary term at the center of the model, and having the students fill out the surrounding four sections as the read or after they read a text. Those four section are: definition, facts/characteristics, examples, and nonexamples. This model helps students learn the term in the context of the unit, apply their understanding by thinking of examples and nonexamples, and activate their prior knowledge and connect that knowledge to new material, a key component in constructivist learning (Richardson, n.d.; Tracey & Morrow, 2012). I thought the use of nonexamples was an interesting twist, because knowing what a concept isn’t can be as important as knowing what the concept is. An alternate form of the Frayer model described by Buehl (2014) uses examples and nonexamples as two of the four sections, but instead used essential and nonessential characteristics as the other categories. Another variation, which could be useful for review, is to give students a completed chart and have them determine what the central key word should be (Richardson, n.d.) For the purposes of this activity, I chose the first method described by Richardson (n.d.).

When using the Frayer Model in the classroom, there are five steps a teacher must take (Richardson, n.d.). First, the technique itself should be introduced using a common word, such as the term rectangle, so the students understand the purpose of the Frayer Model and how it is used. Second, the teacher should complete any frontloading exercises, if necessary, and have students read the selected text. Third, the teacher must select the key term for the center of the Frayer Chart and ask students to help complete the chart. After that, students can practice filling out the chart in groups using another term. Last, students share their completed charts with each other and the class for discussion. Julie and I agreed that the Frayer Model was an excellent graphic organizer because it requires students to summarize, in their own words, the key points of a concept, apply their knowledge by listing examples and nonexamples of the term, and discuss their understanding with others (Richardson, n.d.). The Frayer Model I completed for the term greenhouse gases is shown below:

In my Frayer Model, shown above, I placed the term greenhouse gases in the center. Ideally, students will be exposed to multiple texts that use the same term, so that they may use the graphic organizer as a way to summarize those texts in one convenient location. Because greenhouse gases were discussed to some extent in each of our texts, I used all three texts and my prior knowledge to complete the chart. The definition I used was written in my own words, and the characteristics I chose were those that I felt were most important from my prior knowledge and the readings. In the examples and nonexamples sections, I included the major gases in the atmosphere, as well as some other common gases students would be familiar with.

I found the Frayer Model to be a very useful graphic organizer for a term like this. This type of graphic organizer wouldn’t work for all terms, such as the word “ozone”, because students may not know how to include examples and nonexamples of such specific terms. Nevertheless, this organizer could serve as a great reference for students when studying. They can easily look back on this chart to see the definition, characteristics, and important examples of this crucial concept. The Frayer Model works particularly well with greenhouse gases because students will be exposed to this topic via many texts, and should have plenty of background knowledge of greenhouse gases. Using the Frayer Model can help them take this enormous amount of information and consolidate that into one handy tool for study.

References

Abraham, J. (2017). Earth's oceans are warming 13% faster than thought, and accelerating. Retrieved from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/mar/10/earths-oceans-are-warming-13-faster-than-thought-and-accelerating

Anderson, R.C., and Nagy, W.E. (1992). The Vocabulary Conundrum. American Educator, 16, 1-13. Retrieved from https://blackboard.stevenson.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-1350008-dt-content-rid-5225322_1/courses/15S8W2_ED_620_OL1/The%20Vocabulary%20Conundrum_ED354489.pdf

Blakemore, E. (2016). The Ozone Hole Was Super Scary, So What Happened To It? Retrieved from Smithsonian website: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ozone-hole-was-super-scary-what-happened-it-180957775/

Buehl, D. (2014). Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (4th ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Richardson, F. (n.d.) Frayer Model. Retrieved from National Behavior Support Services website: http://www.nbss.ie/sites/default/files/publications/frayer_model_-_vocbulary_strategy_handout__copy_3.pdf

Royal Astronomical Society. (2017). Paintings, sunspots and frost fairs: Rethinking the Little Ice Age. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 4, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170404084420.htm

Tracey, D.E., & Morrow, L. M. (2012). Lenses on Reading: An Introduction to Theories and Models. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Ocean Warming is Accelerating!

An analysis of text selection and reading comprehension strategy use in science- Part III

The article discussed below can be found here:

Climate change is a topic that is relevant both to current events and biology curriculum. In order to prepare our students to analyze and utilize texts they encounter relevant to climate change, Julie and I have chosen three texts and six reading comprehension strategies that we may use in our future classrooms. This week, the article we chose is titled Earth's oceans are warming 13% faster than thought, and accelerating, written by John Abraham. I found this text through the subreddit called “r/science.” On this website, users can submit interesting scientific articles and tag them with subjects such as physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. I frequently use this website to keep up with current news in the world of science. When I read the headline for this article, I thought it might be a good fit for use in our studies. Reading the article confirmed this suspicion, as it clearly meets the criteria listed by Guilford, Bustamante, Mackura, Hirsch, Lyon, and Estrada, in their 2017 article Text Savvy. Abraham’s article connects to content standards, engages the readers, is an appropriate length, contains scientific evidence, is complex, yet readable, and has vocabulary that is challenging but accessible. The combination of these factors makes this article appropriate for use in high school biology classrooms.

The first thing about the article that caught my eye was the title. Right off the bat the author informs the readers that Earth’s oceans are warming faster than we thought, and the rate of warming is accelerating. For me, the title was effective because it tells the reader what the article will be about and captures their interest immediately. The title also includes the most important findings of the study, which helped both Julie and I remember the key results after just our first reading. In the first few paragraphs, the author provides some background information about how fossil fuels add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causes a warming effect, which can possibly be best measured in the oceans. These first facts immediately connected me to my prior knowledge and made me interested in expanding on that knowledge. I was also initially curious about how the warming of the oceans would be measured, because clearly new information obtained by researchers differed from what they previously thought. Abraham describes this new system for collecting temperature data, and it’s the description of this new system and the analysis of its findings that are the main focuses of the text.

Abraham mentioned early in this text that he co-authored a scientific article in which he and other researchers used a new type of sensing device called the Argo float system to measure the current ocean temperature and estimate the previous ocean temperature by sinking the floats to various depths. In this article, he summarized the findings of his other text in layman's terms. Julie and I appreciated this because the author of the article himself participated in the research, and he provides a link to the original research so that more advanced readers can look at the data and/or a comparison of the texts can be done after this more superficial article is read. The analysis of both texts could be an interesting activity in which students analyze differences in language and tone, based on the target audience of the work.

Further down in the main portion of the text, Abraham explained how the Argo float system works and compared their measurements to recent and well-recorded temperatures to assure readers that their model could estimate the temperature in the past. This is how the researchers concluded that the ocean’s temperatures were increasing faster than initially suspected; they compared more modern, sophisticated techniques to previous techniques that were subject to bias, unreliability, and data gaps. Julie and I liked this comparison because it shows students that new technologies shed light upon older measurements and conclusions. Science is constantly evolving, and reading this article could give students an appreciation for how new research builds upon previous research. Abraham then briefly mentions that these temperature changes affect air temperature and storm patterns, causing 2015 and 2016 to be the two hottest years on record and a series of floods and hurricanes to plague oceanside communities. Ending his article this way stresses the importance of the research results and leaves readers curious for more. Can seemingly small temperature changes really cause such devastating weather events? What other impacts could ocean warming cause? What can we do to slow down and reverse ocean warming?

The purpose of this article was to inform readers that Earth’s oceans are warming faster than scientists previously thought, and that the warming rate is actually increasing. The article is written from a single point of view, but that point of view happens to be that of one of the researchers who collected the data relevant in the study. Julie and I loved that the author of this more accessible article also co-authored the more complex scientific article that was summarized. After all, you’d struggle to find sources much more reliable than the original researchers themselves! This particular researcher, John Abraham, does a wonderful job of explaining the relevant research findings in a concise, accessible way for readers of all skill levels. He even provides a link to the other article, allowing those who are curious to delve into that more detailed text. Julie and I appreciated him linking the article, and thought that reading both articles might be a nice activity for a higher level class such as an Advanced Placement high school biology course. The target audience of the article we analyzed was the general public, as it was published in The Guardian, a news outlet popular worldwide. The original work, on the other hand, was published in Science Advances for other scientists and academics to read.

The genre of this particular text could be considered a news article, while the original article is a peer-reviewed journal article. The language is serious and scientific; no figurative language or humor is used. We think the primary text frame of Abraham’s writing is concept/definition. He describes the new method of measuring ocean temperature, the Argo float system, and explains how that system has given researchers a more accurate understanding of climate change. Because the focus of the text was to explain this system and how it works, we considered concept/definition to be the most appropriate frame. However, this frame is far less clear than the previous two articles we analyzed, and there are certainly other text frames utilized by the author. For example, the author opens his article with a description of the causes of global warming and the effects it has on weather events. He also uses some proposition/support features as he convinces the readers of his viewpoint. Julie and I found these details to be more background information than the main point, though, and chose the concept/definition frame as the most applicable.

Julie and I considered this article to be of an intermediate difficulty compared to the previous two we read. The language is slightly more advanced than the ozone hole article we analyzed last week, but far less advanced than the Little Ice Age article from the previous week. We therefore concluded that this article would be appropriate for both middle and high school students. Middle school students, who would have less background knowledge about climate change, would certainly need more frontloading in order to understand the article, because readers who possess more background knowledge relevant to a topic will have a better understanding of a text related to said topic (Buehl, 2014). The author’s target audience is an average consumer of news, but he doesn’t spend too much time describing background process to the readers, nor does he define the key terms he uses. For example, he doesn’t explain how carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere, he just writes that it’s accumulation contributes to global warming. Similarly, he doesn’t explain why extra heat ends up in the ocean, he assumes readers understand that water has a high specific heat and that roughly 70% of the Earth’s surface is water. Therefore, students should be familiar with the following terms and processes prior to reading this text: fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, atmosphere, weather, climate, specific heat, global warming, hemispheres, and bathythermographs. For higher level learners such as high school students, these terms probably won’t need to be reviewed in much detail, but the teacher should still consider students’ prior knowledge when selecting reading comprehension strategies to implement.

Our task for this week was to use an extending thinking strategy with this text. These strategies are primarily used after reading a text to elaborate on learning, clarify questions and misunderstandings, and apply what was learned (McLaughlin, 2015). Julie and I decided to utilize two strategies that require partners, paired summarizing and concept/definition mapping. Paired summarizing requires two readers to each write a short summary of a text they’ve read. After writing those summaries, the readers exchange summaries and each write a summary of what their partner wrote. This strategy forces readers to pick out the key points of the text and determine what is the most important (McLaughlin, 2015). Concept/definition mapping helps readers use what they’ve learned to create something that organizes information and lists crucial vocabulary. Furthermore, it helps students actively engage the material and make connections between prior knowledge and new topics, two key components in constructivist learning (McLaughlin, 2015; Tracey & Morrow, 2012). Because both of these activities require a partner, Julie and I combined them so that two strategies that extend thinking were used. Viewing the work of the other also led to quality discussion, as we compared what each of us thought was important information. We purposely left the instructions for our strategies vague to see how each of us would approach the activities. The full summaries and concept maps can be found in the linked document.

The summaries Julie and I wrote included most of the same information, but we each took different approaches to creating the summaries. I used a chronological approach. I went back and read the article again, writing sentences about the details I considered important as I read. On the other hand, Julie’s summary was more global. Instead of rereading the article as she wrote her summary, she reflected on what she read and wrote a summary from memory that focused more on the big-picture points. Consequently, my summary was a bit longer and included more specific details, such as the number of Argo floats and the dates at which ocean warming began. One identical piece of information we both included was the statistic that oceans are warming 13% faster than previously believed, and that rate is accelerating. We concluded that because that statistic was in the title of the article, we both considered it important information, given the author himself chose to emphasize it.

The concept maps Julie and I created were also quite similar. We both started with the same topic heading “Warming of Earth’s Oceans” and wrote subheadings and bullet points separately. I had subheadings titled “What are the key terms?”, “How we know:”, “Why it’s happening?”, and “Impacts.” Julie’s subheadings were “Data collection”, very similar to my section about how we know, “Causes”, virtually identical to my section about why the oceans are warming, and “Why we should care”, which included the same information as my section about impacts. There were two primary differences between our concept maps. First, my concept map had a section for key terms, while Julie’s did not. Nevertheless, those key terms I specified were included elsewhere in Julie’s concept map. Second, I extended my thinking in my concept map by including information in the “Impacts” section that wasn’t explicitly stated in the article, while Julie did not. Specifically, I wrote that the warming of the Earth’s oceans would also likely impact biodiversity by changing habitats and potentially causing certain species to become extinct. This difference likely arose because of the vague directions we gave ourselves. If we were to incorporate this activity into our curricula, we would certainly need to provide clearer directions for our students, but our slightly different approaches led to interesting discussions. Lastly, I included a few extra subheadings that I would look for in a higher level class. Julie currently works in a standard middle school class, while I work with honors high school students, so I included two extra subheadings, titled “Who is studying this?” and “Where and When?”, that would be more appropriate for the advanced students. I separated these from the ones mentioned above, knowing that these points were less crucial for understanding the article.

Julie and I strongly feel that paired summarizing and concept/definition mapping worked well for this text and would be useful for use in our future classrooms. Both strategies required us to select the information from the text that we thought was most important. For the most part we agreed on these things, but there were enough differences to create a valuable discussion. For example, I used a chronological approach to my summary, included more dates and statistics in my summary, and extended my thinking by hypothesizing other impacts of ocean warming in my concept map. Julie used a more global approach to her summary that included fewer details, and only included information in her concept map that was explicitly stated in the article. It’s interesting that we agreed on virtually everything while we were discussing the article, and the few differences in our summaries and maps fostered even better discussion. Perhaps those differences arose because we have different learning styles, or maybe the level of students we’ve been working with has affected the depth of our work. Additional benefits of these strategies are: students realize that revisiting material several times helps learning, students become comfortable with verbalizing their understandings, students are encouraged to collaborate, students reduce what they’ve learned into meaningful summaries, students’ prior knowledge is engaged, and students construct visual representations of essential concepts (Buehl, 2014). For these reasons, we highly recommend paired summaries and concept/definition maps as useful reading comprehension strategies for extending student thinking.

Full summaries and concept maps can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PqRNU6CXIMLfxv_IvoLoirwDSWvUgdfDNNV8uUEpZ7s/edit?usp=sharing

References

Buehl, D. (2014). Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (4th ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Guilford, J., Bustamante, A., Mackura, K., Hirsch, S., Lyon, E., & Estrada, K. (2017). Text Savvy. The Science Teacher, 84 (1), 49-56. Retrieved from https://blackboard.stevenson.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-1349981-dt-content-rid-7100950_1/courses/17S8W2_ED_620_OL1/ED%20620_Science%20Journal.pdf

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Tracey, D.E., & Morrow, L. M. (2012). Lenses on Reading: An Introduction to Theories and Models. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Race to Extinction: Ozone Hole vs. Life on Earth

An analysis of text selection and reading comprehension strategy use in science- Part II

The article discussed below can be found here:

Continuing on our journey to find appropriate texts and analyze them with effective reading comprehension strategies, Julie and I found an interesting article titled “The Ozone Hole Was Super Scary, So What Happened To It?” by journalist Erin Blakemore (cited above). As a reminder, we chose the topic of climate change because of its relevance to current events. Students who frequently watch the news or use the internet will be exposed to countless texts regarding climate change. Some of those texts will undoubtedly be biased, misleading, inaccurate, or incomplete in some way. Others may be informative and useful for citizens of all occupations. Regardless, we as teachers want our students to be critical and effective readers so that they may analyze those texts and apply what they learn as a scientifically literate members of society. This particular text was actually found by my partner, Julie. She found this article on the Smithsonian website, which has a section for teachers containing articles suitable for grade-school students.

When I read this text for the first time, I really enjoyed the narrative created by the author. The article is very informative, but the information is told like a story, starting with the discovery of ozone and transitioning smoothly to the mapping of the ozone layer, then to the realization of its depletion, followed by the mobilization of the world to save our biosphere, and finally a follow-up on the current state of the ozone hole and how this issue compares to modern global warming. The author’s decision to tell this story in chronological order helped me understand how each event impacted the next, and it actually created suspense as I wondered how scientists would stop the ozone hole from increasing in size. I was amazed by the reaction the world had to the ozone layer’s depletion; it’s very different than my perception of how people view climate change today. The discovery of the ozone hole caused so much panic that in 1987 twenty-four nations signed the Montreal Protocol, which limited the use of chlorofluorocarbons, chemicals that destroy ozone. The author expressed concern that because the effects of global warming due to CO2 emissions are more gradual, they are harder to quantify and fear than the ozone hole was. Despite this, some environmental researchers see the response to the ozone hole as a beacon of hope. If so many nations were willing to come together to protect the ozone layer, could a similar response happen with global warming? One of the reasons Julie and I chose this article was the conversation it could start as students respond to this question, among others.

Julie and I thought this article would be perfect for a middle school or high school level biology class. Crucially, it met all of the criteria necessary for using a science text with our students (Guilford, Bustamante, Mackura, Hirsch, Lyon, & Estrada, 2017). It connects to content standards, as learning about environmental change is an important part of any biology curriculum. The article is also engaging and fosters curiosity, as the author does a great job of captivating the interest of the readers with eye-opening statistics and quotes. Furthermore, it’s short, contains evidence, and is complex yet readable. Lastly, the author uses language and vocabulary that is complex yet accessible for high school students. Because it was so relevant and interesting, we decided to use this text for our literary analysis.

The purpose of our chosen article was to revisit the ozone hole, a topic that was popular in the media about thirty years ago. The author explained the events leading up to the discovery of the ozone hole, reflected upon the panic it caused and the actions scientists took, and finally compared the ozone hole crisis to the current global warming situation. This is done without figurative language, humor, or irony; the language is serious and scientific. The article is also written from a unique, unbiased perspective. The author, Blakemore, is not a scientist, but is a journalist who summarized the scientific events and principles related to the ozone hole crisis. Julie and I thought her not being a scientist was part of what made the article so accessible, a topic discussed more thoroughly in the next paragraph. Blakemore’s summary was done chronologically using a cause/effect text frame. Blakemore described what happened with the ozone hole, the events leading up to its discovery, what would happen if factors were different, and what scientists are doing going forward. The text also has problem/solution elements, as the author describes the ozone hole problem, the causes and solutions to said problem, and the results of those solutions. Julie and I felt that the cause/effect frame was probably more appropriate because the article uses a heavy time component, describing how our understandings and perceptions of the ozone hole have changed over time. This frame also puts readers in a mindset that promotes discussion. How does our current environmental situation compare to that of 30-40 years ago? What actions could we all take to slow modern global warming? The potential this article has to start discussions is another reason we chose it for our analysis.

Compared to the previous article we chose, Julie and I felt that this article found a better balance between accessibility and complexity, possibly because the author was not a scientist. Most of the article’s keywords are defined and described in detail such that someone without much background knowledge of the topic would still understand the material. For example, the author defines ozone as a gas made up of three oxygen atoms, and describes the ozone layer and its effects in appropriate detail. Nevertheless, a reader who possesses more background knowledge of a topic will have a better understanding of texts related to that topic (Buehl, 2014). Therefore, the use of frontloading techniques (Buehl, 2014) or engagement strategies (McLaughlin, 2015) would be beneficial for activating students’ prior knowledge, setting the purpose for reading, and capturing student interest. Important vocabulary that may need to be reviewed before reading this text include atmosphere, ozone, stratosphere, ultraviolet light, radiation, chlorofluorocarbons, and greenhouse gases. Terms that students should know, but may need to be discussed in less detail are environment, sterilize, oxygen, element, and concentration. Some words that may not be related to biology, but could be confusing to students include interferometer, contrails, and variances. One of my favorite things about this article is that it highlights key points and provides hyperlinks for more information. For example, when the author cites the findings of a research paper, such as the paper that summarizes the history of ozone, that paper is linked directly in the text. This allows students to do further research and compare multiple texts, if necessary. Finally, the written text is accompanied by a NASA video that describes how the ozone hole varies in size, and how researchers know it is shrinking. I found this video especially informative, as it provides visuals of the ozone-depleting chemicals concentrating around the poles and causing ozone holes. Using multiple texts and forms of media during a literacy lesson could lead to a more nuanced discussion, and we thought younger students would especially benefit from the addition of the video.

Our challenge for this week was to use a reading comprehension strategy to guide our thinking. These strategies are primarily used during reading, whereas the engagement strategies we used last week were primarily for use before reading (McLaughlin, 2015). Of course, many of the strategies we’ve studied are used to some extent before, during, and after reading a text; however, the ones we used this week are those that most emphasize processes to be completed while reading. The strategy Julie challenged me to use is called text coding. Coding the text involves using sticky notes to indicate points in the text where we are able to make connections. McLaughlin (2015) encourages the use of text-text (T-T), text-self (T-S), and text-world (T-W) connections, as these require students to actively engage the text and activate their prior knowledge. The three types of connections students can make correspond to the three types of prior knowledge students can access. When students reflect on personal experiences that relate to the text, they are making text-self connections. When students remember other texts they’ve read, likely in school, they are making text-text connections. The third type of connections, text-world connections, are made when students draw comparisons between the text they are reading and the overall idea of a topic they have gleamed from many sources, including the media and conversations they hear (Buehl, 2014). Julie and I were drawn to this strategy because, unlike some of the other strategies we’ve studied, it has students activate different types of prior knowledge during reading, not just content-based knowledge. Activating prior knowledge of personal experiences, for example, could engage students more.

I found coding the text to be a highly engaging reading comprehension strategy. It forced me to listen to my inner dialogue while reading, instead of passively reading through the material. For example, in the second paragraph of the article, I made a text-text connection between the author’s description of oxygen and the periodic table I used countless times in chemistry courses. I visualized the table when I read those sentences, and visualized the molecular structure of ozone from my organic chemistry textbook when ozone was described as a molecule made of three oxygen atoms. When the author noted that ozone provides protection from the sun’s UV rays, I thought about all the times I had applied sunscreen to prevent being sunburnt, and imagined how different being outdoors would be without the ozone layer, a text-self connection. Finally, I made a text-world connection when the author described the ozone hole as the second of three major atmosphere-related concerns in our history, following acid rain and preceding greenhouse gas-based global warming. I thought about how the media and my peers have reacted to global warming, and wondered how I would have reacted if I was alive during the ozone hole crisis.

I think text coding is an excellent strategy to use for this text. Because the topic of the text is related to both course content and students’ everyday lives, many connections can be made between the text and personal experiences and previously learned material. If students are then given the opportunity to reflect on how the reading changed their perception of the material, they will certainly learn more, as engaging prior knowledge and actively reflecting on how new knowledge relates to old knowledge are the two most important tenets of constructivism (Tracey & Morrow, 2012). I also have come to appreciate the flexibility coding the text provides. For one, coding the text could easily be modified such that students list relevant personal experiences and prior knowledge before reading, make connections during reading, and reflect on those connections during a discussion after reading the text. This would allow the comprehension strategy to be used before, during, and after the actual reading. Furthermore, Buehl (2014) describes an alternate form of coding the text, in which students use “R” to denote things the texts reminds them of, “V” to signify things they visualized, “E” to signify emotions, “Q” to mark questions they have, “I” to signify information they’ve learned, “?” to mark sections they don’t understand, and “!” to label interesting information. This is another interesting way to have students make connections and use metacognition while reading. Advantages of both forms of text coding are: students create a personal understanding of the author’s message, students appreciate that comprehension comes from an inner dialogue between the author’s words and the reader’s thinking, and students must summarize key points in their own words, helping them remember and understand better (Buehl, 2014). For these, reasons, I think coding the text is a strategy that I’ll utilize in my future classrooms.

Our second search of the literature led Julie and I to an article that was more accessible than the first. The vocabulary in this article was still quite complex, but we both considered it more manageable for middle and high school students than the one we analyzed last week, leading us to conclude that frontloading would be less critical. I was challenged to use text coding as a guiding comprehension strategy while reading, and was pleased with the results. This strategy activates prior knowledge by making connections not only to material previously learned in class, but personal experiences and worldly-perceptions as well. I found myself examining the interplay between the author’s message and my own thinking, leading to a more personal understanding of the text. Coding the text was especially useful for this text in particular because of this text’s relevance to our everyday lives and course material. Students may have more difficulty using this strategy with a cell biology text, for example, because text-self and text-world connections may be less obvious to the students. I certainly view this strategy as an effective one, and intend to add it to my repertoire of skills that will accompany me into the classroom.

References

Buehl, D. (2014). Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (4th ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Tracey, D.E., & Morrow, L. M. (2012). Lenses on Reading: An Introduction to Theories and Models. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Little Ice Age or Big Overreaction?

An analysis of text selection and reading comprehension strategy use in science- Part I

The article discussed below can be found using this reference:

Royal Astronomical Society. (2017, April 4). Paintings, sunspots and frost fairs: Rethinking the Little Ice Age. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 4, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170404084420.htm

The topic my partner, Julie, and I chose for our text and reading comprehension strategy analysis was climate change. Learning about climate, and environmental science in general, is an important part of any biology curriculum. This topic in particular stood out to us, however, because of its relevance to current events and politics. The concept of global warming is a hot topic (no pun intended) in the media, and students are exposed to many articles, blogs, and news stories pertaining to climate change via the internet. As teachers, we want our students to be able to effectively read and critically evaluate those texts, so that they may interpret and apply that information in the best way possible. Let’s not forget that these students are future voters, policy-makers, reporters, scientists, and other members of society. It’s our job to ensure that they enter the workforce as open-minded, scientifically literate individuals.

This particular text (cited above), titled “Paintings, sunspots and frost fairs: Rethinking the Little Ice Age,” stood out because it was very recently published by ScienceDaily. The article used historical and meteorological data to determine if an ice age occurred between the 16th and 19th Centuries, as is commonly believed. The authors then compared the temperature change of that “Little Ice Age” to the changes we are currently witnessing courtesy of global warming. What initially peaked my interest was a graph that displayed the summer maximum and winter minimum temperatures of central England, compared to the long-term average. This data shows that while temperatures fluctuate cyclically over time, explaining the occurrence of multiple ice ages throughout history, there is a general warming trend since the mid-twentieth Century that is undeniable evidence of global warming. Furthermore, we chose this article because it met all of the necessary criteria to use as a science text with our students. It connects to content standards, is engaging and fosters curiosity, is short, contains evidence, is complex yet readable, and has vocabulary that is complex yet accessible for high school students (Guilford, Bustamante, Mackura, Hirsch, Lyon, & Estrada, 2017).

The first time I read through the text, I was curious to see how the researchers would analyze the climate from over five hundred years ago. What types of evidence would they use? How could they possibly compare 15th Century climate change to the change we are experiencing today? I was ultimately pleasantly surprised by the approach the researchers took to the problem. They used cores taken from Antarctic ice to infer global temperature, based on the proportion of heavy isotopes in the ice. Using ice samples from different depths allowed the researchers to take temperature samples from summers and winters dating back to the early 1600s. They compared these temperature inferences to historical evidence including sunspot counts and paintings from the time depicting weather conditions. Julie and I thought this was a great example of how scientists studying history have to find creative ways to make inferences about data that wasn’t reliably recorded at the time. Evidence from multiple sources and disciplines is often integrated to obtain the clearest representation of reality. While reading, I also noticed that the article certainly didn’t shy away from using technical language, but I thought the difficulty of the text was reasonable for high school students, particularly with multiple readings, teacher guidance, and the use of effective reading comprehension strategies.

The text in question is a research-based journal article with a text frame best described as proposition/support. The authors of the study proposed that the “Little Ice Age” was misleading, and provided evidence supporting the notion that the temperature changes of the “Little Ice Age” were small, seasonal, and insignificant compared to modern global climate change and previous ice ages. The purpose of the article was therefore to discredit certain historical evidence of this ice age and persuade readers that modern global warming is much more pertinent. In doing so, the authors assume that readers are relatively familiar with the scientific terminology relevant to climate change, as definitions are not provided in the text itself. There is only one point of view in the article, that of the scientists researching climate change, but they smartly provide the evidence supporting the “Little Ice Age” and debunk said evidence in addition to providing their own evidence. The authors do this without figurative language or humor; the language is serious and scientific. Julie and I agreed that this text was a great example of how scientists often reach competing conclusions, and how new evidence sheds light on previously believed ideas. These are two enduring understandings that students should appreciate long after they’ve forgotten the specifics of the content knowledge (Buehl, 2014).

As mentioned above, the language used in this text was challenging. Therefore, a teacher hoping to use this strategy in class would likely have to use a frontloading technique or engagement strategy to address background knowledge concerns prior to assigning the article. Students with more prior knowledge about the topic of a text will have a greater understanding of the text, and frontloading allows a teacher to point out important vocabulary, spark student interest, and better prepare the students for utilizing the text (Buehl, 2014). Vocabulary terms in the article that may need to be addressed by the teacher include: climate, greenhouse gases, frost fairs, sunspots, and atomic isotopes. Other terms that students should know, but may need to reminded of are atoms, evaporation, solar activity, and carbon dioxide. Additionally, students will need to understand the causes of climate change, including how volcanic events and greenhouse gas concentration affect temperature, as these are explained only briefly by the authors.

Engagement strategies, sometimes called previewing strategies, can be used to activate students’ prior knowledge, set the purpose for reading, generate predictions and inferences, and help students make connections to other texts and experiences (McLaughlin, 2015). The engagement strategy Julie asked me to use for this week was a Quick-Write. Quick-Writes require students to respond to prompts that help them make personal connections to a text. Quick-Writes can come in many forms, including learning logs, exit slips, and, in this case, template frames. Student responses to the template prompts are informally written on paper during a short allotted time frame and often shared with a partner (Buehl, 2014). Template-framed Quick-Writes have many advantages. They encourage student reflection, show students that learning occurs after several readings, give students practice writing short summaries of key information, and provide teachers with feedback on student understanding (Buehl, 2014). The specific prompts I used were as follows:

1.) I already knew that…

Average global temperatures fluctuate cyclically throughout history.

2.) This helped me to understand.....

How researchers use isotopes of Hydrogen and Oxygen to estimate temperature.

3.) Something that surprised me......

Was even though we’ve experienced global warming throughout the last century, the sunspot number has actually decreased significantly

4.) I want to know more about.....

The competing interaction between sunspot number and greenhouse gas concentrations, and the net effect that has on global warming.

I think Quick-Writes are great tools to use as reading strategies, although the way I used it may not have been the best for engagement per se. Quick-Writes are useful because they offer flexibility to the teacher. They can be used to make predictions, write new understandings, and reflect on learning. In other words, they can be used before, during, and after readings (Buehl, 2014). The specific prompts I was asked to respond to were probably better for use after reading, because they required me to reflect on what I already knew, what I learned, and what I would like to learn more about. If I wanted to engage my prior knowledge more, useful prompts could include either of the following (Buehl, 2014):

A key term about this topic is…
A person reading about this topic may need to know…

In a real classroom, more Quick-Write prompts would be utilized for a more effective lesson, but the small taste I was provided with showed me the power of reflecting upon newly learned material. From a constructivist standpoint, learning can only occur when students are actively engaged with the material and connect new knowledge to their established prior knowledge (Tracey & Morrow, 2012). This reading comprehension activity certainly aided me in meeting both of those prerequisites. I found myself thinking about the prompts when I was reading the text, then reflecting on the text as I was writing responses to the prompts after reading. This active approach to literacy is crucial for student learning, especially from a constructivist standpoint. I would therefore recommend using Quick-Writes for this text and similar texts, and intend to use this engagement strategy in my future classrooms.

References

Buehl, D. (2014). Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning (4th ed.). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Tracey, D.E. and Morrow, L. M. (2012). Lenses on Reading: An Introduction to Theories and Models. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.