Skip to main content
 

Reading Like a Scientist: Teaching Students to Strategically Read Multimodal Science Texts

Science and Children—January/February 2024

By ,

Calls for disciplinary literacy instruction in elementary schools encourage teachers to provide authentic opportunities for students to read and write like scientists. Enacting disciplinary literacy with problem-based learning practices to inquire about the world and find solutions to real-life problems is an effective practice for integrating elementary science and literacy instruction. Science texts found in printed and digital formats are becoming increasing multimodal in nature and require students to have complex navigation and interpretation skills when being asked to read like scientists. We provide a framework, that emerged from our work with urban elementary students in a summer camp, with steps that support students to read like scientists as they use multimodal science texts within a problem-based learning context. These concrete, practical steps combine explicit instruction using think-alouds with disciplinary literacy strategies in science.

Instructional Materials Interdisciplinary Literacy Teaching Strategies Early Childhood Elementary

Asset 2