Hi. It's Paul Andersen and this is Science and Engineering Practice 8. It's
on obtaining, evaluating and communicating information. And so it's how scientists and
engineers take in information, make sense of it and then share it with rest of the world.
And that communication is super important because in science it allows us to share our
explanations. And in engineering it allows us to share our solutions. And a study was
done on communication in 2004, this is by Tenopir and King, and they talked to scientists
and engineers and what they found is that they're spending more than half of their working
time reading, interpreting and producing text. And so that's wild. That means that they're
spending more then half of their time doing what we would think of as not research. As
not doing science. Not in the laboratory doing studies. And so the reason that is, is that's
how science works. Basically scientists do research. They gather data. They come up with
theories. They test those theories. But when they're done, they publish them in a scientific
journal. Other scientists read those, they replicate their results. They build upon them.
They approve upon them. And so this whole idea of primary literature, scientific journals
and how they drive innovation is very important. And it drives the day of scientists and engineers
as well. And so that communication can take several forms. First of all it can be in the
form of the scientific journals. It can be in books that they publish. They can attend
symposiums and they can present their data to other scientists so they can receive information
back. And they can use websites to publish their results and share that with rest of
the world. And so that formal communication is actually publishing something that you
want to have your peers review. Your peers look at. There's also informal communication
that takes place every day. And so it's going to be discussions. Here's a famous picture
of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr talking about quantum theory. E-mail is going to drive
a lot of people's days, scientists and engineers, as they get information from other people
and they share their own information. But it can be phone calls. It can be blogs. It
can be Twitter. It can be all of these forms of informal communication. Sharing information.
And it's very important, especially technology is driving this now, this crowd sourcing of
science. Everyone working together on solutions. Big science we sometimes call that. Now this
whole idea of making sense of information is a struggle for students. And so students
find difficulties, especially in reading science text. And number one reason why is scientific
jargon. And so let me read you a little section from this journal. "Axonal signals transiently
activate the expression of the transcription factor oct6 in in Schwann cells that ill form
myelin, and cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) can mimic axonal contact in vitro."
I actually know what that means, but most of you don't. And the reason why is that we
don't live science day to day. And so that jargon gets in the way. If I were to tell
you that in vitro means in a test tube that would help. If I were to tell you that Schwann
cells will wrap around neurons to speed nerve transmission and form a fatty substance called
myelin, that might help. And so students struggle with scientific reading and the reason why
is that they don't have this foundation. And another reason they struggle is that the intent
of science text and science textbooks for that matter, is that the student can read
them or the researcher can read them and they get information out of it. And so it's not
a narrative. It's not a story that's fun to read necessarily. It's information that needs
to be disseminated in a systematic way. And so that makes it a struggle for our students.
And then finally it's multi modal. In other words science journals, science textbooks
are going to have, you know, graphics. They're going to have photographs. They're going to
have images. They're going to have data. They're going to have graphs. And so it's difficult
as students are reading through that to move back and forth between the text and then between
these different modes of presenting information. And so what's the goal then, as a science
teacher? What should be the goal in a science classroom? We want our students to be able
to consume information and then we want them to be able to create and share information
of their own. And so if we break that down a little more in detail, we want them to be
able to read books. We want them to be able to read text. And we also want them to read
primary literature. Primary literature remember is going to be literature that is created
by scientists and created by engineers. This is those journal articles for example. We
also want them to create information. We want them to communicate their understandings.
And then finally we want them to share that in writing or in presentation. And so what's
the progression? In other words, how do we teach this from elementary all the way through
high school? How do we get students to obtain, to evaluate, communicate this information
with others? In other words how do we have them from day one throwing darts at the dart
board and then getting better and better over time? Well you want to start by talking about
explicit instruction. So don't assume that just because you're a science teacher that
it means you don't have to teach reading. You're going to have to teach reading. You're
going to have to teach scientific reading. And so you want to get students from the moment
they can read, looking though not just narrative but scientific information. Scientific journals.
Now you don't have to give them a scientific journal. You can given them articles that
are at their own level, but you want them working through the text and giving them strategies.
I worked with my students a lot this year on reading strategies. Ways that they could
look through the material. Preview the material and then go back through it. You also want
to give them explicit instruction on how to look at tables or data organized in a table.
How to use graphics and diagrams and how to explain it. And then spend a lot of time going
through graphs. Showing them how to interpret a graph. What do the labels mean? What do
the axis mean? And asking them questions based on that. Don't just assume that they're going
to learn that in your other classes. You have to teach them how to read science in the science
classroom. We also want to have them reading primary literature. So we want them reading
science. Not just narratives of science. And so there's a mistake that we made in science
education. That was this idea that hands on instruction is super important and this message
out there that you really want students to do hands on learning. And that's true, you
want them doing experimentation in a science classroom. It makes it more exciting. But
you don't want to do that in the absence of text. You want them to look through science
text as well. And so there's a movement towards what's called adaptive primary literature.
If you just give your students primary literature, like a journal article. I can tell you this
from experience, especially, I mean even in a high school classroom, if you give them primary
literature, they're going to be totally confused. It's at a level that's written for doctoral
students and they're not going to get it. And so there's a movement towards adaptive
primary literature. In other words instead of just writing a book, looking at actual
primary literature and then writing a narrative. And so this is one of these adaptive, they
call it a primary adaptive, primary literature and this is from the University of Alberta.
And basically they're going through research, this was an article that was published in
geology, and then kind of writing a story that goes with it. Then having the students
move through that material. That is a lot of work. For me, Scientific American is a
scientific magazine and it's not a journal per se, but they have nice scientific articles
that are written to disseminate scientific information but they're more at the level,
especially of like a high school student. And so you could look at Science News would
be an example of something like that as well. Next we want them to start communicating their
own understanding. And we want them to be able to do that from the time that they can
just start reading and writing. And so a science notebook is really important. It allows them
to organize their data and also their explanations. And so what goes in there, drawings, numbers,
words, data, what they think, their guesses. All of that should go in their science notebook.
They should get into this idea that in science you do science and you also have to share
that science with others. And so this will culminate as you move into high school and
middle school with actually publishing reports. Publishing scientific reports based on the
data that you have. And so I have my students do this in class. They'll also give formal
presentations to the rest of the class. So kind of like a PowerPoint presentation where
they take their data and they summarize it and share it with the rest of the class. A
big movement now is into the area of what are called mini posters. Because if you do
scientific research, you'll publish your research using a research poster, where you have an
abstract, your introduction. You talk about the methods that you're using and so a lot
of science teachers will just use double folders. You take two folders. You glue them together.
And then their students are creating these mini posters where they've got their abstract,
introduction, data, diagrams, things like that. And it's a great idea. You can then
have them share that. So you can have poster exhibit where the other students walk around
and can look at that. And so again we're gathering information, making sense of the information,
sharing it with rest of the world and that's a huge part of the daily life of a scientific
researcher or an engineer. And it's important that we get our students read for that. And
I hope that was helpful.}