No More Science Kits or Texts in Isolation: Teaching Science and Literacy Together (Not This but That)

Product Description

It is common to engage students in the process of science, using mostly hands-on activities, and equally common to provide students with only science knowledge through mostly text-based experiences. Neither of these approaches is authentic to how scientists make sense of the world. Both fail to connect those experiences to the larger purpose of science. In this book Jacquey and Gina show you why, and how integrating science and literacy instruction supports students’ understanding of and engagement in both.
Using research as their guide, Jacquey and Gina show you how to integrate science and literacy learning in a way that reflects the authentic ways scientists work. The authors have identified three key principles supporting this integration:
Principle #1: Frame student investigations with a scientific purpose.
Principle #2: Integrate “hands-on” science with literacy to support science learning.
Principle #3: Help students engage with text in science.
Throughout the book, they describe research that supports each principle and share examples of effective integration in the classroom that enhance students’ science learning, reading and writing growth, and motivation.
To avoid the trap of textbook-only science or inquiry-only science, we need to aim for synergy – engaging students in using firsthand experiences and text-based experiences as connected parts of investigating questions about the natural world.

About the Author

Jacqueline Barber is co-author of No More Science Kits or Texts in Isolation and Director of the Learning Design Group at the University of California, Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science.

Gina Cervetti is coauthor of No More Science Kits or Texts in Isolation and a co-author of Comprehension Going Forward. An assistant professor of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Colorado Boulder, she teaches graduate-level courses on reading instruction and assessment. The focus of Gina’s work over the last decade has been on students’ development of academic literacies with a particular focus on reading comprehension – and, more recently, talk – in science. In particular, she has been exploring the question, How can literacy instruction be made more authentic, powerful, knowledge-enriching, and personally meaningful through integration with content-area instruction? Gina completed studies of integrated science-literacy instruction as a context for language development and science learning for English language learners and of how middle school students learned to engage in sense-making science conversations in a summer science and reading program. Before joining the faculty at CU Boulder, Gina was a curriculum developer and researcher for the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nell K. Duke, Ed.D., is a professor in literacy, language, and culture and also in the combined program in education and psychology at the University of Michigan. Duke received her Bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and her Masters and Doctoral degrees from Harvard University. Duke’s work focuses on early literacy development, particularly among children living in economic poverty. Her specific areas of expertise include the development of informational reading and writing in young children, comprehension development and instruction in early schooling, and issues of equity in literacy education. She has served as Co-Principal Investigator of projects funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the George Lucas Educational Foundation, among other organizations. Duke has been named one of the most influential education scholars in the U.S. in EdWeek. In 2014, Duke was awarded the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award from the Literacy Research Association, and in 2018 she received the International Literacy Association’s William S. Gray Citation of Merit for outstanding contributions to re