How you can promote scientific literacy in your Physics class!
If 2020 has taught us anything it’s that scientific literacy is important. It always has been and always will be. I don’t mean being able to read and understand a paper on theoretical physics but being able to read and understand journal articles, newspaper articles or magazine articles on science.
In terms of our pupils, they are examined on their use of scientific terminology. For a typical triple physics GCSE paper ~35-40% will be maths and equations leaving ~60-65% as written questions. Our pupils have to be able to write coherently complex scientific ideas and we need to help them with this. I therefore believe it is our duty as science teachers to expose our pupils to as many examples of actual scientific writing as possible and help them to develop their vocabulary skills.
To be able help them, we don’t need to teach them about the details of how we learn to read, spell etc – although it is very interesting for us as educators – but we should teach them how to break down words to aid understanding and effective scientific communication. There are numerous ways to do this and everyone will have their own way of teaching their pupils these skills but I am going to share with you my favourite way.
Article reading. I love reading a journal article with my classes. I usually pick a couple and let them vote on which one they want to read majority wins (democracy in practice, cross-curricular link with politics!).
When picking the articles there are a few things I consider:
1. Do I actually want to read the article? I know it’s a bit selfish, but, hear me out. If I am going to get the pupils interested in science and reading science of their own free will I need to get them excited and interested. I can’t do this with an article I wont enjoy or don’t want to read!
2. Will the majority of my class be interested in this? I always try to consider whether most of the class will enjoy the article even if its not the one they voted for. The main reasons for this, behaviour, engagement and getting them to enjoy science. If they are all interested in the article then even if its not the one they voted for then they will engage better leading to better behaviour. The key to this is knowing your class and pupils!
3. Reading ability of the article. I teach mixed ability sets so I have a range of grades from 4-9, luckily for me the reading ages of my pupils are all very similar making article choice a bit easier for me. I do however pre-read the article and run it through reading age determining software[1] to ensure that the reading age is appropriate. With lower reading age groups its upto you how to do this. I am a strong believer in setting high expectations of pupils and that every pupil should be able to achieve highly but we have to help them get there, so that being said even with lower reading age groups I will use the same article but maybe we won’t read all of it or I would give them a pre-made glossary of the scientific terminology to aid them. I would also scaffold the summarising follow up task for them.
4. Scientific content of the article for me – with the content of the article do I understand it well enough and the science behind it that I can effectively and coherently explain that to the pupils when they ask questions. When article reading together the key is discussion. When I do this I actively encourage the pupils to put their hands up and ask questions whether it be about a word or specific content. This enables me to develop their understanding of the content. This often leads to some amazing conversations also!
5. Scientific content for the pupils. Do the pupils have the required background knowledge to understand the article? If yes perfect but if not is the background easy enough to explain to them and give them an overview so they can access the article. Is the scientific content too advanced? Depending on your class this can be a good or a bad thing. If you have really high ability pupils giving them a harder article to really stretch and challenge them may be the way forward. If you have lower ability pupils scaring them with really hard concepts may not be the way to go and maybe a different article is needed, or be brave and go for it! It may give them a new found love and appreciation for science!
Sometimes I do this a bit different at A-Level. In my A Level classes there tends to be a few different career paths amongst the pupils with them preparing to or having already submitted their UCAS applications. I like to use this to mine and their advantage when doing article reading. I will select an article for each career path in the class. I get them to stick the article onto a3 paper and then they can use all the surrounding paper to annotate to help their understanding of the article. Then in their groups I let them read the articles together without me. The one problem for me is that I cannot possibly understand or know every single technical term that appears in the journals and I am not ashamed by this – I’m human! When this occurs I allow them to do some research using their phones to help them understand the words helping them develop important research skills – finding the required information, critiquing its credibility/reliability and then interpreting and understanding. This helps them immensely when preparing for interviews and university giving them valuable skills.
Regardless of whether this is GCSE or A Level the follow up task remains the same – summarise the article in your books in no more than 3 paragraphs. For A Level and high ability GCSE pupils that’s all the guidance they get! This makes them think, they have to decide what parts of the article were the most important and then they have to succinctly and coherently communicate that through writing using complex and sometimes new terminology. Its actually quite hard! They love it and soon get used to it as part of a routine. For lower ability pupils I scaffold this activity more by giving them a theme for each paragraph, a selection of sentence starters and some keywords that I want them to use. For very low ability I split the keywords into paragraphs along with the theme of that paragraph. Sometimes getting the pupils to write can be a struggle but I’ve found that if you persevere and get the level and type of scaffolding right every pupil will produce a good summary.
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