Engaging students in scientific practices does not always align well with traditional textbooks. As this study illustrates, locating multiple texts that fit well into active inquiry in science and engineering can be daunting. Yet with even one additional text, teachers can move beyond “content delivery” to engage students in problem solving and meaning-making that draws on texts that represent the ways of thinking and problem solving in science and engineering: graphs, models, maps, videos, datasets, or diagrams. This study suggests that, although finding worthy texts is challenging, a well prepared group of science teachers collaborating over time can create text-rich lessons that are relevant and engaging to students.

Please view and use model lessons and units that Reading Apprenticeship teachers created. They are free and accessible in our ‘curriculum’ resources.

How to cite this article: Greenleaf, C. Hinchman, K. A. & Brown, W. (2023). Science teachers designing text use for equitable Next Generation Science instruction. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Volume67, Issue3, pp. 162-174.

Disciplinary literacy encompasses not only the ability to read the texts of a discipline, but also to engage in the practices and discourse of that discipline. At the center of the discipline of history is inquiry. Historians practice their craft within a community of inquiry, to which they bring the dispositions, habits of mind, stances, frameworks, and thinking and reasoning processes that allow them to tackle this work. Vital to their craft is reading—reading primary sources as well as the work of other historians in the form of academic articles, monographs, and other secondary and tertiary texts.

Historians handle an astounding array of text types, including letters, speeches, government documents, political cartoons, maps, and charts; as well as the literature, science, art, and philosophy of an era; and artifacts, like mummies, tools, and counts of pollens in soils. It is from these varied, uneven, and incomplete remnants of the past that historians select evidence, apply reason, and construct interpretations. It is through this evidentiary record that historians attempt to understand the complexity and significance of human experience.

Read this article to see teachers learning and enacting new ways to get their students reading and arguing with a range of text types. Teachers help students from a diverse backgrounds build common knowledge through shared reading, and then they guide students to engage in a wide range of strategies— role play, debate, document analysis — to help students build historical thinking, knowledge and agency.

See one of the authors, Gayle Cribb, teaching here

This article, which includes co-authors and Reading Apprenticeship leaders Will Brown, Gayle Cribb, and Cynthia Greenleaf, discusses how to design goals for what students need to know – and be able to do – in three disciplinary areas — literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline engaged in conceptual meta-analysis of theory and research on the reading, reasoning, and inquiry practices exhibited by disciplinary experts as contrasted with novices. Each team identified discipline-specific clusters of types of knowledge which gave rise to discipline-specific goals and tasks involved in reading across multiple texts, as well as reading, reasoning, and argumentation practices tailored to discipline-specific criteria for evidence-based knowledge claims. The framework of constructs and processes provides a valuable tool for researchers and classroom teachers’ (re)conceptualizations of literacy and argumentation learning goals in their specific disciplines.