Ocean Warming is Accelerating!

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:

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

    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.