RAR: Reading and Writing About Science!

   I chose to read an article that was inquiry-based and it was about a research project called RWS (Reading and Writing About Science), which you can read here. I chose this article because I wanted to learn more about inquiry-based learning since I find it interesting. The article focused more on the reading and writing behind it, but I wanted to see how to include them without overdoing it. As you can probably guess from the title, the research is about finding ways to incorporate literacy into science in order to improve students' reading and writing skills in general. They have four basic components or steps that everyone is supposed to follow: connect, organize, reflect, and extend. Connecting is what every teacher should be doing in the beginning of any lesson by figuring out what the students already know about the topic and helping them make connections between the new information and what they already know. The organize stage is where they have to put together all of the information from different sources and make sense of it. Reflecting takes place when they discuss the information with others before they begin writing and completing the assignment is where the student extends their learning.
   I actually really enjoyed reading this article; it gave me some great ideas to use in the classroom. One thing that a teacher did during the connect phase was have students' comments on a piece of chart paper that was kept up on the wall throughout the unit which was revisited and revised by the students and teacher. The article also emphasizes the use of graphic organizers, especially ones that had a similar theme to what the students are writing about. The research project used webs, linear string, falling dominoes, branching trees, and matrices in order to "match" the topic and it actually improved the students' writing tremendously. It's interesting how much the type of graphic organizer can impact student performance; I didn't even think about how important it would be to choose one that goes along with the actual topic. Here are examples of the graph organizers that they used during this research:

I found this chart really helpful and I can use it in the future when I'm teaching science!

   This article also mentions misconceptions, which we talked a lot about in class so it was cool to see that in this research. They mentioned that the reflect phase is the last opportunity to correct any science misconceptions and solidify the knowledge they gained. The writing prompts used during this project must contain five elements: focus, audience, type, purpose, and supporting details in order to assist the students with the writing process. It also helps the teachers create assignments that assess student thinking and learning better. Here is an example of a writing prompt, student response, and graphic organizer that would be used as well as the breakdown of the five elements:

Sample:

   They try to focus the writing on authentic audiences such as science magazines and younger students, which I love because I've actually used similar audiences when I taught lessons to whole classes. One time I had second graders write letters to the first graders and this year I had the students write a story that we were sending to an author. It makes the writing more realistic and interesting for them, so they enjoy writing it more. This project also included sharing writing with peers and teachers, which I've found is also something that students absolutely love participating in. The purpose of sharing the writing, according to this article, is to show students what others write and give them examples so the students can compare their work to their peers. I think this is a good idea, but it could also be bad. Students should feel proud of their work and not feel like they're stupid because they can't write as well as another student might. I think that sharing writing is important, but the soul purpose shouldn't be to have students compare their work to others. One of the struggles they encountered during this project was to develop a rubric that scored the science content and not just the general writing piece, but they were eventually able to come up with one which can be seen below: 

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Rubric:

   Overall, this project was very successful and resulted in an increase in both length and coherence of the students' writing and the performance gap between students decreased tremendously. The article included some quotes from the teachers who were involved in this project which I have below: 

• “We [teachers] realize that narrative and exposition share features. But we now prefer exposition over narrative for teaching reading and writing—it’s more concrete, and instead of teaching narrative first to students, we think that exposition should be taught first and that read/write instruction should be content-based.”
• “The instructional methods we are using in RWS clue the kids in on what the instructional format is going to be. After doing one unit, the kids know what’s coming and prepare themselves along the way. It’s creating a reflective student, not just the teacher. Students are “owning” the instruction and are motivated.”
• “Instead of just creating scaffolds for content, we’re creating scaffolds for process. We’re creating successful practice, and think that it will lead to successful large-scale assessment.”

I would love to use this program in my own classroom because it seems effective and very organized. I especially like the different types of graphic organizers that they used. The article contained all of these examples, so I think that it's be easy to implement. Reading and writing is extremely important to incorporate throughout all subjects to help students become better readers and writers, so I like this program.