Little Ice Age or Big Overreaction?

    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.

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

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