Reading with technology: the new normal

ABSTRACT

Widespread changes in communication associated with new technologies have led to a growing interest in digital literacy. Although the concept of digital literacy suffers from a lack of agreed definition, this paper suggests that reading and writing with technology remains a key point of concern. The written word, a central feature of evolving patterns of communication, is now used in new ways and often in combination with different media as new devices and physical practices are recruited to the task of meaning making. The influence of different ways of thinking about these new communicative practices has led to the development of the diverse body of research outlined here. Tracing these strands in current research and writing about digital practice is used in order to identify how literacy has both expanded and diversified. Because it is now a significant aspect of full participation in social and cultural life, reading with technology raises important questions for education. This paper suggests that in England policy in this area is poorly articulated and argues that there is a pressing need for more focused classroom research to develop practices that support digital literacy.     

Improving the reading skills of young people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy in preparation for adulthood

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive genetic condition that affects both muscle and brain. Children with DMD are at risk of psycho‐social difficulties such as poor academic achievement and behavioural and socio‐emotional problems. This article by Janet Hoskin and Angela Fawcett, both from the University of Swansea, describes how 34 participants with DMD took part in a 36‐week online literacy intervention which was delivered in partnership between home and school. The key objective was to improve reading skill. Participants were re‐tested at 36 weeks for single word and text level reading, comprehension, fluency, processing and timed single word reading. Pre and post results indicated that children who followed the intervention for 36 weeks made significant improvement in their single word reading (p = <0.0001), timed single word reading (p = <0.0001) and text level reading (p = <0.004). They also made significant improvement in their fluency and comprehension scores. The results showed that children with DMD and related literacy difficulties benefit from a regular, structured and systematic synthetic phonics programme. With young people with DMD increasingly living into adulthood, early literacy intervention is particularly important to ensure optimum career and training opportunities.     

The Promissory Future(s) of Education: Rethinking scientific literacy in the era of biocapitalism

This article investigates the biopolitical dimensions that have grown out of the union between biocapitalism and current science education reform in the US. Drawing on science and technology study theorists, I utilize the analytics of promissory valuation and salvationary discourses to understand how scientific literacy in the neo‐Sputnik era has deeply involved educational life in biocapitalist circuits of exchange and production. I lay out this emerging terrain of ‘futuricity’ through a biopolitical analysis of the National Academies highly influential policy recommendation on science education, Rising Above the Gathering Storm as well as the Association of American Universities' National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative. Here it is argued that the educational subject usually seen as a site of human capital investment can better be understood as a ‘biovalue’ in at least two senses: the educational subject's body as a site of investment and as an extractable source of value directly related to the larger globally competitive regime of the rapidly growing bioeconomy. I conclude my analysis of the vital politics at play in the biocapitalist articulation of science education with an alternative model of scientific literacy that is based in what I call biodemocratic practices. I explore such a rereading of scientific literacy through the example of the GrowHaus—a sustainable urban farm situated in a marginalized community in a major US city. The GrowHaus offers a model of scientific literacy that rejects extractive ethics associated with biocapitalist production and instead promotes a sustainable and socially just practice of science.     

Information literacy in science writing: how students find,identify, and use scientific literature

For undergraduate students to achieve science literacy, they must first develop information literacy skils. These skills align with Information Literacy Standards and include determining appropriate databases, distinguishing among resource types, and citing resources ethically. To effectively improve information literacy and science literacy, we must identify how students interact with authentic scientific texts. In this case study, we addressed this aim by embedding a science librarian into a science writing course, where students wrote a literature review on a research topic of their choice. Library instruction was further integrated through the use of an online guide and outside assistance. To evaluate the evolution of information literacy in our students and provide evidence of student practices, we used task-scaffolded writing assessments, a reflection, and surveys. We found that students improved their ability and confidence in finding research articles using discipline-specific databases as well as their ability to distinguish primary from secondary research articles. We also identified ways students improperly used and cited resources in their writing assignments. While our results reveal a better understanding of how students find and approach scientific research articles, additional research is needed to develop effective strategies to improve long-term information literacy in the sciences.     

中西科学教育的比较及其启示

我国科技协会2010年公众科学素养调查结果显示,公民的科学素养远远低于美国、加拿大等西方国家。本文通过对中西科学教育的比较分析,发现中西科学教育在科学本质理解、科学教育目标和内容、科学教育方法等方面存在差异。因此,在当前教育全球化这一大背景下,我国科学教育的改革与发展必须要借鉴、吸取西方发达国家的先进理念,以提高我国公众的科学素养为旨归。     

提高公众科学素养与科学教育新理念

从公众科学素养的调查可见,科学教育仍然是提高公众科学素养的最基本的途径和最主要的手段。因此,科学教育的理念必须符合科学素养内涵与目标的变化与要求。这种新的理念主要是：理解科学的本质,建立科学教育整体性目标;强化通识教育,建立以适应与创新能力为核心价值的教育模式。     

核心素养下高中物理教学中的德育渗透

在现阶段的高中物理教学中,学生的核心素养问题备受社会各界人士关注.本文将从核心素养的渗透对于高中物理的教学意义,教学过程中可能遇到的问题以及如何将核心素养有效渗透我们的教学方法这三个方面进行一一阐述.     

Addressing the Dynamics of Science in Curricular Reform for Scientific Literacy: The case of genomics

Science education reform must anticipate the scientific literacy required by the next generation of citizens. Particularly, this counts for rapidly emerging and evolving scientific disciplines such as genomics. Taking this discipline as a case, such anticipation is becoming increasingly problematic in today’s knowledge societies in which the dynamics of the natural sciences is unprecedented. This raises the question of how scientific literacy can be defined in order to appropriate the dynamics of natural sciences such as genomics. Drawing on a contemporary sociocultural perspective on the dynamics of science, the science education research literature is briefly reviewed in this respect. It is argued that scientific literacy captures the dynamics of science once defined as an emergent feature of collective activity. This requires a form of science education to which the learners’ agency is central. The implications of this thesis will be discussed in regard to the case of embedding genomics in science curricula.     

How the environment is positioned in the Next Generation Science Standards: a critical discourse analysis

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the environment and environmental issues are conceptualized and positioned in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to examine underlying assumptions about the environment. The NGSS are a recent set of science standards in the USA, organized and led by Achieve Inc., that propose science education goals based on the National Research Council report, A Framework for K-12 Science Education. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, we present a detailed textual analysis of the NGSS to identify the positioning of the environment with respect to humans and human activity. This analysis shows patterns in the ways that the environment is conceptualized and inscribed in the standards as an entity separate from people through both exclusion and ambiguity. We also discuss findings about how agency is more often ascribed to actions or activities rather than people and when solutions to environmental issues are included, the focus is on technoscientific solutions. Finally, we provide implications for considering scientific and environmental literacy, education for action, and the role of standards documents in shaping educational practice.     

The Teaching Focus of Adult‐Reading Teachers When Developing Word Reading Skills

Despite widescale literacy interventions, reading difficulties persist in the adult population. Results from international surveys report that millions of adults around the world remain unable to read the texts they require for daily life and work. Adult reading difficulties are diverse and under‐researched, and adult‐reading teachers are generally underprepared to build reading skills, particularly at word level reading where many adults report difficulties. This study examined (i) the teaching foci that 60 adult‐reading teachers prioritised in determining how to teach a hypothetical adult reader with difficulties at the word level and (ii) the teacher attributes by which these decisions varied. Around 40% of teachers indicated that they would prioritise non‐word level components in deciding how to teach the hypothetical reader with word level difficulties, and these decisions varied with teachers' training/qualifications. To make sense of the persistence of low reading levels in the adult population, it is necessary to understand more about what teachers teach and why they teach the way they do. The findings of this study may provide an important step towards this goal.     

Literacy and development: Rationales,myths, innovations,and future directions

Literacy and economic development have existed as terms that are inextricably linked in the literature, often with little examination. As one looks more closely at the rationales for this relationship, it becomes clear that much more needs to be known about the functions and uses of literacy in everyday life, how literacy is linked to productive activity and how literacy is learned and taught across the life-span. In order to achieve both understanding and improved literacy programming, it is essential that better methods of assessment and program evaluation be put into place. This paper reviews prior experience in assessment, with special attention to the use of literacy surveys, as well as some of the problems with international literacy statistics. The paper concludes with a discussion of innovations in literacy and policy alternatives in the year 2000 and beyond. Also provided is an extended reference list on the published literature in this area.     

A call for a new geoscience education research agenda

A lack of qualified teachers and low enrollment in the geosciences exist at both secondary and tertiary levels in the United States. Consequently, it is unlikely that students will be able to achieve scientific literacy without an increase in both of these populations. To address these problems, we pose research questions, highlight sociocultural theories, and provide examples of other science education research as possible avenues by which to explore these related problems. We argue that such research studies are necessary to inform science education policy and advance national scientific literacy. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:121–129, 2010     

科学教育的重要途径—非正规学习

非正规学习在培养学生科学素质方面具有正规学习不可替代的重要作用。了解非正规学习的特点、规律和怎样影响人的科学素质的形成和发展对当前我国政府倡导的大力普及科学教育,提高全民,特别是未成年人的科学素质具有重大意义。非正规科学学习不仅能为学生提供丰富的认知冲突和社会互动机会,使他们建立起更加完善的知识结构,而且还能提高他们的科学论证能力。非正规学习是发展学生科学素质的必经之路。     

Socioscientific issues via controversy mapping: bringing actor-network theory into the science classroom with digital technology

ABSTRACT

What are the current challenges and opportunities for bringing actor-network theory (ANT) into issues-based science education? This article discusses experiences gained from introducing an educational version of ANT deploying digital technology into an upper secondary school science class. This teaching innovation, called controversy mapping, has been pioneered in different contexts of higher education before being adapted to school education. Experimenting with controversy mapping in a Swedish science class raised both conceptual and practical issues. These centre on: (1) how ANT-inspired controversy mapping redesigns the citizenship training enacted by institutionalized approaches to issues-based education as socioscientific issues (SSI); (2) how controversy mapping reconfigures the interdisciplinarity of issues-based science education; and (3) how controversy mapping displaces scientific literacy and knowledge of the nature of science as guiding concerns for teaching in favour of new preoccupations with digital literacy and digital tools and methods as contemporary infrastructures of free and open inquiry.     

Christopher Winch and Peter Wells,Nene College,Northampton

Abstract:

This paper records both dissatisfaction and evidence of poor current standards of literacy, notably in the area of the written word, among higher education students. It also suggests what may be done to remedy the situation.     

Becoming a literacy teacher: approximations in critical literacy teaching

The new literacy studies (NLS) is a tradition of research that includes ethnographic work on literacy that has many applications for classroom teachers. The NLS include explorations of local literacies and critical literacy as well as the notion of literacy itself. When teachers draw on the NLS, students are able to draw on their practices in critical and transformative ways. However, NLS perspectives have not been used to examine how teachers are prepared in pre‐service programs and the ways critical literacy practices develop. This paper examines how two pre‐service teachers learn to take up definitions of local literacies in their work with students from racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse backgrounds in practicum settings. They use approximations in literacy teaching to design practices with students, demonstrating the process of becoming a teacher of literacy. I conclude with recommendations for teacher educators who are interested in supporting such approximations.     

Just Google it! Digital literacy and the epistemology of ignorance

ABSTRACT

In this paper we examine digital literacy and explicate how it relates to the philosophical study of ignorance. Using data from a study which explores the knowledge producing work of undergraduate students as they wrote course assignments, we argue that a social practice approach to digital literacy can help explain how epistemologies of ignorance may be sustained. If students are restricted in what they can know because they are unaware of exogenous actors (e.g. algorithms), and how they guide choices and shape experiences online, then a key issue with which theorists of digital literacy should contend is how to educate students to be critically aware of how power operates in online spaces. The challenge for Higher Education is twofold: to understand how particular digital literacy practices pave the way for the construction of ignorance, and to develop approaches to counter it.     

Using formative assessment to promote argumentation in a university bilingual science course

Formative assessment, bilingualism, and argumentation when combined can enrich bilingual scientific literacy. However, argumentation receives little attention in the practice of bilingual science education. This article describes the effect of a formative assessment-based pedagogical strategy in promoting university students’ argumentation. It examines the written and oral arguments produced by 54 undergraduates (28 females and 26 males, 16–21 years old) in Colombia during a university bilingual (Spanish-English) science course. The data used in this analysis was derived from students’ written responses, and audio and video recordings. The first goal of this study was to determine how this teaching strategy could help students increase the use of English as a means of communication in argumentation in science. The second goal was to establish the potential of the strategy to engage students in argumentative classroom interactions as an essential part of formative assessment. The findings show that the strategy provided participants with opportunities to write their argumentation in Spanish, in English and in a hybrid version using code-switching. Educational implications for higher education are discussed.