My Literacy History

             Reading has been an integral part of my life for nearly my entire life. Both of my parents were avid readers and so they encouraged me early and often to begin reading. I remember working on “Hooked on Phonics” materials before I had started kindergarten. My parents used flash cards and cassette tapes to help me to learn, but the memory that stands out the most is reading the Dr. Seuss book called Hop On Pop. There was a tradition in my family that all of the children read that book as their first book. I remember being very proud when I accomplished that goal. Once I started reading, I never stopped. I remember a moment vividly when I was sitting at breakfast and realized that I could read the games on the back of the cereal box. That moment made me realize that words were everywhere and being able to read made the world much bigger and exciting.

I entered school able to read and continued to get my hands on every book that I could find. Through elementary school, I began reading a series of books that I had seen my older brothers reading called the Boxcar Children novels by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I read through at least 10 of those novels during elementary school and received a great deal of joy from discussing the stories with my brothers. At the same time, I began trying to write stories of my own. At one point in 5^th grade, I attempted to write a short story based on a reoccurring dream that I was having, but never ended up finishing it. In fact, I never finished any stories that I began. I got much more enjoyment from reading other people’s stories.

             My most pivotal time in reading, however, began in middle school when my mother brought home the first Harry Potter novel. The librarian at my school had recommended it to her as a series that I would like. As a family, my mother, my father, my little brother, and I would all read the book together before bed. My mother and father would take turns reading out loud to us. Eventually, after we had made it through both the first and second books, I realized that I could get through the story much faster if I was able to read it on my own. From that point on, I always had first dibs on any new Harry Potter novels and would finish them within the first few days of receiving them. The Harry Potter books were the first books that got me exciting about stories set in worlds different than our own. Also, I found myself caught up in the cultural phenomenon that was building around the stories and loved being able to talk with my peers about the stories. The books gave me a sense of belonging to a community. The experience of reading the Harry Potter series definitely molded the love that I have for science fiction and fantasy books today.

While my memories of reading and writing for pleasure are very vivid, I do not remember required reading and writing for school as clearly. In elementary school, particularly, I do not have many memories tied to literature. However, I do remember an instance in third grade where I was involved with a gifted and talented program and had to do a project on an animal in the Amazon Rainforest. I had to read informational text about ocelots and prepare a presentation about them. This is probably my earliest memory of reading and presenting scientific information.

Interestingly, one of my most creative writing assignments was given to me in a 6^th grade social studies class. In this class, we had to pick a historical topic and change the lyrics a few songs so that they were about that topic. I remember changing the lyrics to “Naked” by Avril Lavigne so that it was about the first Olympics in Greece. I had so much fun working on this assignment that I still remember some of the lyrics I wrote to this day. Thinking back, this was a very innovative way for the teacher to assess what knowledge we had retained during his class while also keeping us engaged.

Despite having plenty of writing assignments in middle school, I made large strides in my writing ability during 9^th grade when I took AP US History. The teacher made it clear from the beginning of the class that he planned to prepare us for the level of writing that would be expected of us during college. With his guidance, my formal writing skills were dramatically refined. All of the following writing heavy AP classes that I took continued to help me develop my skills as I prepared for college.

             Since high school, I have maintained an interest in reading for pleasure but have also expanded that interest to include reading to further my knowledge of the subjects in which I am professionally interested. Through college classes and job experiences, I have learned to read and interpret scientific journals, as well as how to find reputable resources for information online. One of the most important lessons I have learned is how to be critical of informative texts in order to make sure that I am interpreting them correctly. This is an important skill to have when there is information so readily available on the Internet. I grew up with computers and the Internet so much of my experience with reading and writing is intrinsically connected to technology. As my literacy skills advanced, my technical literacy increased as well. Moving forward, I want to instill the same passion for reading and writing in my students while also teaching them how to adapt those skills to the new technology that we are being introduced to every day.

Check out my visual representation of my literacy history here. 

Science Role Models and Engagement Study

The effect of positive science role models on science engagement

Abigail J. Rein

Stevenson University

Introduction

            One of the most important problems in education today that I have both heard about and experienced while observing classrooms is that science teachers have difficulty with student engagement. This is particularly true in a “traditional” learning setting where students listen to and take notes on a lecture given by the teacher. There are several well-documented methods of increasing student engagement in science courses, including making science courses more project-based and interactive. Often, these methods ask students to make connections between what they are learning in class to what happens in the world outside of school. Another proposed method for increasing student engagement in science is to prove students with scientific role models. In a 2014 article from Werderich, it is recommended that teachers use biographies of scientists to help students connect with the science content that there are learning. Not only does reading biographies about scientists like Charles Darwin help students to develop reading compression and literacy, it also allows for students to be exposed to a more personal account of how scientific concepts, like natural selection, were discovered and introduced to the scientific community. Werderich (2014) advises the use of scientist biographies helps to enhance science instruction and increases student engagement with the classroom content.

            While reading biographies does provide students with some exposure to science role models, many researchers have decided to take this research further by actually having student work with scientists to solve scientific problems. Researchers developed a collaboration called Partnership for Research and Education in Plants (PREP) to provide a way for students to learn more about plant science as well as work with scientists to create and carry out a study on plant genetics (Dolan, Lally, Brooks, & Tax, 2008; Peker & Dolan, 2012). In these two studies, the researchers looked at various aspects of the student-scientist partnership to determine the effect it had on the students experience with science. Peker & Dolan (2012) determined that scientists provide important initial scientific information to the students, but often the teacher was integral in helping students to form complete connections between the research and the classroom science content. This emphasizes that the teacher must be actively engaged in supporting the partnership. On the other hand, Dolan et al. (2008) focused on the benefits for the students found when the partnership had been completed. The researchers discussed the importance of “authentic science” to make learning exciting for students. Within the PREP collaboration, students worked with researchers to set up and run experiments. It was noted in the article that this helped encourage students’ creativity and allowed students to feel as though they contributing to the field of science (Dolan et al., 2008). In this study, scientific role models provided students with an opportunity to get first-person experience with science that resulted in higher engagement with the material.

            Similarly, Rider University created the Program for Regional Outreach and Biology Education (PROBE) to provide instructional assistance for high school science teachers (Feldstein & Benner, 2004). This assistance consisted of providing students with experience in on-campus science laboratories and assessment of student learning. For high school students, the experience of running science experiments in a university laboratory built feelings of enthusiasm and responsibility for the outcome of the experiments. Researcher also found that PROBE increased the students’ academic development, with some students scoring higher on AP exams following participation in the program (Feldstein & Benner, 2004). Clearly, this experience with science in a context outside of the high school was beneficial to students involved in PROBE.

              Interestingly, the effect of scientific role models on engagement still exists when the partnership is conducted through online discourse. Adams and Hemingway (2014) looked at the patterns in discourse that occurred when scientists (both undergraduate and professional) mentored middle and high school students as the completed a plant science project.  The researchers found that the mentor scientists and students engaged in a large amount of socially focused interaction (60%), which allowed the partnership to be more meaningful for both parties. Within the partnership, the mentor scientists used the discussion to model scientific thinking and problem solving for the students, as well as encouraged students to pursue science further (Adams and Hemingway, 2014). This study shows that a partnership between students and scientists can still be meaningfully conducted even if the two parties cannot meet in person.

            For the current study, the goal is to combine previous research to determine if online discourse between high school biology students and undergraduate scientists about the scientific process as well as specific scientific research can encourage students to become more engaged in the content.

Method

For this study, students in a high school biology class would be assigned a college researcher and would work with the researcher to create a presentation on the scientific concept behind the research. Each researcher would be chosen because the research relates to concepts that have already been learned in my classroom and would be briefed on the expectations of the project. Over the course of two to three weeks, students would be given the opportunity to use monitored email correspondence with the researchers to ask questions and learn about the research. They would be given the opportunity to ask questions and get a glimpse of what it developing a research study entails. Students will also be expected to complete a questionnaire about the process of developing a research study and challenges that their research partner faced. At the end of the questionnaire, there would be a short survey for the students to answer about their opinions of scientific research. Finally, I would conduct interviews with my students to ask specific questions about how being partnered with a researcher affected how they felt about the science content. During these interviews, I would be looking for common themes that students bring up about the ways the experience impacted them.

At the same time, a second class would be taught about the same scientific topics. They would still be assigned to a specific research project, but all information about the research project would be accessed from readings, online presentations, or videos that the researchers put together. Students would only be able to ask questions of the teacher instead of asking the researchers themselves. In this way, the students still have to complete the same assignment; the only difference is that they would not be able to personally connect with a potential role model. The research would be impersonal. The control class would still complete a survey about scientific research and would be interviewed about how the project affecting their feelings about the science topics.

Data Collection

Following the project, the students from both classes would be asked to respond to a series of statements related to engagement. The students would provide their score as a number between 0 and 4 that refers to a Likert scale, with 0 meaning “Completely Disagree”, 1 meaning “Partially Disagree”, 2 meaning “Neither Agree Nor Disagree”, 3 meaning “Partially Agree”, and 4 meaning “Completely agree.” The survey would consist of the following seven questions:

1. This assignment helped me to better understand the process of creating and completing a scientific study.

2. This assignment was too difficult.

3. I would like to learn more about the research on which I completed my project.

4. I was able to find an answer to every question I had about this project.

5. After completing this assignment, I am more likely to pursue a degree or career in science.

6. I would like to complete more assignments with this format.

7. I do not understand what research has to do with the topics that we have studied in class.

Question 2, and 7 are all phrased negatively and scores would be reversed before analysis. These negatively phrased questions ensure that students read through the questions thoroughly before writing down their score.

Qualitative data would also be collected through interviews with each student about their experiences in the partnership. In these interviews, students would be asked questions to determine what they liked and disliked about their experience with the researchers. They would also respond to the question of whether or not they believe interacting with a researcher benefited them. Following the interviews, they would be transcribed and main themes would be identified among the students’ answers. Some anticipated themes are that students were able to see the connection between the classwork and the real world, students felt like they were a part of something bigger, and that students were able to get answers to their questions

Simulated Results

For the purposes of the assignment, each class is assumed to have 20 students. The following results come from a simulated data set and do not represent actual scores.

Table 1: Means of Student Scores on Survey by Question and Class

Question Number	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	Total
Control	2	2.4	2	2.8	2	2.5	2	2.3
Partnership	3.1	2.6	2	2.1	2.6	2.5	2.5	2.5

In Table 1, the scores from each student have been averaged by question with questions 2 and 7 reversed so that higher scores mean higher engagement. These results show that students in the partnership class reported higher scores than the control class for most questions, but not for all of the questions. For questions 4, more students felt that they had unanswered questions in the partnership class than in the control class. There also seems to be no preference between the classes for completing more assignments with this format. Overall, there seems to be a small trend towards higher engagement scores on the survey for students in the partnership class than the control class.

            For the interview portion of this study, students would be guided through an interview and a list of common themes of benefits would be created from their responses. The following table is a simulation of potential main themes in the interviews and the frequencies with which students mentioned them.

Table 2: Common Themes of Engagement During Interviews

Theme	Frequency (out of 20 students)
Connection between classwork and the real world	12
Feeling of being a part of the bigger scientific community	3
Ability to find satisfactory answers to questions	5
Desire to participate in research studies	9
Interest in pursuing science in college	8

Table 2 shows that many of the students interviewed mentioned their ability to identify a connection between what they had learned in class and the larger world of scientific research. Also, several students were interested in pursuing research further through participating in research studies or majoring in science in college. While this data cannot easily show the difference between the two classes, it can give the researchers an idea of how the partnership affected the students.

Conclusions and Discussion

            Each piece of data will provide a different kind of information about the importance of role models to science education. The survey will help to determine if the presence of a science role model helped students to become more engaged with the content. A significant between-groups difference would indicate that the partnership had an effect on engagement. In the simulated data, there is not a large difference, but there is a small trend. This could indicate that the effect of the intervention was not very big, or that the research study should be refined to make sure that the results that are being prevented are valid and represent the true impact of the intervention on engagement.

It would be difficult to interpret the data from the survey without a control class. If students in the partnership class all reported high engagement scores but there was no control to compare them to, the data could not be used to support the hypothesis that research role models have an effect on engagement. The scores could have been high even if the students did not have a research partner. It is necessary to provide a control group with whom the scores can be compared and contrasted.        

The information from the interviews will help to answer the question of how science role models affect student engagement with science content. This data will provide insight into the way that having role models can make students interested in asking questions and discussing science. The main themes discussed in the student interviews would also help to guide future research on this topic and indicate which aspects of the student-researcher partnership should be adjusted when using this activity in the future.

As we continue to look for more ways to increase the engagement of students in science classes, it’s important to find methods that allow students to have meaningful experiences. When they interact with science role models in a partnership, students are given the opportunity to not only work to solve a problem, but also to be provided with a model for how a professional scientist works. The encouragement and connection that can be formed through a student-scientist partnership can often be invaluable for the student. Future research on this topic could help to determine the extent to which role models increase engagement and to identify which types of partnerships are most effective.

References

Adams, C. T., & Hemingway, C. A. (2014). What does online mentorship of secondary science students look like?. Bioscience, 64(11), 1042.

Dolan, E. L., Lally, D. J., Brooks, E., & Tax, F. E. (2008). Prepping students for authentic science. Sci Teach, 75(7), 38–43.

Feldstein, S. M. & Benner, M. S. (2004). Assessing the outcomes of a secondary-postsecondary partnership model for biology education outreach. The American Biology Teacher, 66(2), 114-119

Peker, D. & Dolan, E. (2012).  Helping students make meaning of authentic investigations: Findings from a student-teacher-scientist partnership. Cult Stud Sci Educ. 7(1), 223–244.

Werderich, D. E. (2014). Putting a face to science: Using biographies as mentor texts to teach science and literacy. Ohio Reading Teacher, 44(1), 13-21.