Article: 'I see colours you cannot perceive or imagine'
Rationale
This article would be relevant to my Biology classroom because it can be a springboard for discussions about X-linked mutations, how mutations affect phenotypes, and frequency and heredity of genetic mutations.
Text Frames
Concept/Definition
Anecdotal evidence
Strategies Used
Me: Science Connection Overview (Buehl, 2014)
Partner: Brainstorming Prior Knowledge (Buehl, 2014)
This article may be challenging for students because it contains concepts unfamiliar to students. In addition, most students will not be able to relate to the subject of the article. My strategy utilized a series of prompts to help activate students' prior knowledge and prepare students to read an article or textbook chapter. The prompts are as follows:
What's Familiar?
What's the connection? Skim and survey the reading for things that are familiar and that connect with your life or world. List them below:
What topics are covered?
What topic areas seem to be the most important?
What are you
wondering?
Questions of interest. What questions do you have about this
material that may be answered in the chapter?
·
What will the author
tell you?
What categories of information are provided in this article?
Read and explain.
Enter science words with your explanations into your
vocabulary system.
These prompts helped to take an unfamiliar concept and connect it to my prior knowledge. It also allowed me to skim the reading and make connections before reading the article in depth. It also walks student through creating questions about the article concepts and building their own content vocabulary. It also benefits students by providing prompts for before and after reading. A downfall of this method in terms of this article is that the strategy is geared more towards longer articles or textbook chapters rather than a popular science article. If I was giving this strategy to my students to use, I would probably have them expand on their prior knowledge rather than simply listing them. This way, they would have a better understanding of what they know about the topic before they begin to read the article.
My partner used the strategy "Brainstorming Prior Knowledge" by creating a knowledge map about the concepts in this article. For this strategy, we discussed that providing students with a direction to build their knowledge map would have made it more effective. As it was, my partner found that her concept map was not overly relevant after she read the article in depth. However, this method did work better for shorter, simpler articles than mine did.
Overall, both methods helped to activate prior knowledge and get us thinking before we read the article. With a few changes, both of these strategies could be used for a similar reading in our own classes one day.
Jennie,
ReplyDeleteI like how you provided the questions you would ask a class, or yourself in this instance, and how you were able to go through each prompt when reading the article. I thought it was interesting how you skimmed the article prior to reading it in depth. Would skimming be a part of the activity if you were to assign this to your students? I would be concerned that they would skim the article and think they understand or could answer the questions, but that they would not actually read for understanding. Great job including the downfalls of the chosen strategy. This gave a thorough investigation of the strategy you chose.
Jennie,
DeleteThis is a great strategy, especially for complex text readings. I also like your idea to use this article as a "springboard" for a new topic related to gene expression. To add to Amanda's comment I am wondering after it is assigned, how would you implement the answered questions in class? Would they be shared by the students in front of the class or in small groups or maybe graded and handed back to ensure each student is understanding the assignment?
Jennie, I have to agree with Amanda I would be afraid that students would skim the reading and think they know what is going on. The last classroom I worked in I had a hard time getting students to read directions let alone a whole article. Overall I really like this strategy though, it seems like it would give students a clear breakdown of what they were reading. You also could expand on this idea and use the "I Wonder...." statements mentioned in McLaughlin on page 72-73 (2015).
DeleteAmanda and Dani, you guys make a good point about students skimming only rather than reading the whole text. I think that a solution to this problem would be to provide a summary for students to use to answer these questions. It may also be helpful to include some questions for post-reading that require more in-depth reading.
DeleteTed, I think it would be a great idea for students to share their answers to the questions. I think that I would most likely have them share in small groups that I can observe because sharing in front of the class would be time consuming and may be embarrassing for some students. I may also include some sort of graded component to make sure that all of the students are completing the assignment before coming to class.