This annotated bibliography is a professional development resource for elementary teachers. Organized and presented as a 3 x 4 matrix, the bibliography helps teachers think about science and literacy connections. It provides a guide for the teaching of particular skills at appropriate times.
Hands-on inquiry-based instruction, with its emphasis on student inquiry and direct experience, offers rich opportunities for language use and the opportunity to establish a powerful relationship between science and literacy. If teachers are to take full advantage of these opportunities to enhance science learning through literacy and literacy learning through science, they need to include direct teaching and practice of literacy skills in science. The matrix suggests which literacy skills to bring to the foreground at what points during the process of inquiry and provides resources for doing so.
This bibliography lists specific resources that can be used to help develop students’ literacy skills in all three areas (reading, writing, and speaking and listening) and at each stage of inquiry (engagement and exploration, design of scientific investigations, analysis and interpretation of data, and presentation of findings and understandings). By clicking on any one of the 12 cells in the matrix, users will find that we have compiled a customized list of chapters from several books that speak directly to that stage, and provide guidance for what to do in the classroom. The chapters come from a representative selection of books from the science education and literacy education literature. Of course, there are many more books we could have included and more are currently being written. Our list is a work in progress.
Many of the selected chapters could have been placed in more than one box or cell of the matrix. Clearly reading, writing, and speaking happen continuously throughout the inquiry process in many different ways. Several forms of each could arguably appear in every box. By the same token, the different stages of inquiry share many characteristics, and children move continuously through them.
However, for each stage of inquiry, there is an emphasis on certain kinds of thinking and modes of communication, which lead to more emphasis on certain kinds of literacy. We have tried to capture these emphases in the matrix rather than suggest rigid guidelines. Much of the richness of the books lies in their entirety. It is our hope that reading one chapter will entice the reader into looking at the whole book.
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This matrix is based on a chart that was included in Supporting the Science-Literacy Connection, part of the book Learning Science and the Science of Learning: Science Educators' Essay Collection, edited by Rodger Bybee (NSTA Press, 2002). The chart draws from the inquiry standard of the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) to define inquiry as a four-component or four-stage process for developing understanding: (1) engagement and exploration, (2) design and conduct of scientific investigations, (3) analysis and interpretation of data, and (4) presentation of findings and understanding. Each of these stages uses reading, writing, and speaking and listening for specific purposes and, therefore, requires customized strategies for language instruction.
