Even though a test may be designed with the intention of purely testing the students' knowlegde of the content, it is not so for those struggling with reading. Written tests, unfortunately, prevent such students from excelling in the subject, no matter how good they might actually be at solving math problems, applying physics principles, or even at performing experiments in bio or chemistry for that matter.
I believe that a science teacher's principal role should be to ensure that his/her students gain a solid understanding of scientific content.
According to me, the process of learning science is more hands-on and a minds-on, and things like language and the text book are just tools. As a science teacher, it would certainly not be my priority to train my students to scrutinize the text or identify subtleties in it. In fact, I would try to frame my test questions so that they are easy to read and understand, and would expect similar answers from my students. In addition, I would also have my students do experiments, projects and presentations (and grade them on each of these), thus providing a wider window of opportunity for doing well.
Assistive technologies can help students greatly in this respect. For instance, auditory learners find reading and absorbing large amounts of information simultaneously a challenging task. For such learners, the read aloud softwares can be extremely helpful. This software also comes equipped with features such as highlighting important text and an inbuilt dictionary which instantaneously looks up the meaning of the desired word in the text... which I think is pretty cool ! On a different note, difficulty in reading might also be due to poor vision. Magnifying software can blow up the text to 20 to 30 times the original size (without much distortion), which is ideal. Thus, assistive technologies play a major role in helping out students.
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I agree that assistive technologies can help students, and I also agree in simply-phrased test questions. I have issues with the idea that language is not important in science. If I wanted to, I could argue that language is the most important thing in the world. If you disagreed with me, how would you tell me? Language is vital. The ability to express yourself and understand others is how we build knowledge of the world around us. I love a hands-on approach, and I sympathize with struggling readers, but the real world doesn't care if a person can't read. The expectations on them will not change. I don't want to come off as too harsh-I do not mind helping these students. It just strikes me as odd that exchange of information could ever be considered unimportant in science.
ReplyDeleteKina.. thanks for your comments. I'm glad you brought this up, and I think it's best that I clarify right away what I was trying to convey.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I don't think I mentioned (and certainly did not mean to imply) that learning the language is unimportant. On the contrary, it is extremely important.. rather it is 'imperative' that each and every student learns the language well enough to be able to understand and communicate the content reasonably well. We as teachers need to ensure this.
However, the point I was trying to get across is that language is not THE key component in learning science... especially not for struggling readers. In learning science the traditional way, language is a tool,a medium. Moreover, since the discussion is on the topic of struggling readers, I think it would be fair to say that for the sake of such students, focus on the language should certainly not be the primary focus. Fortunately we have assistive technologies to help struggling readers overcome their difficulties.
The principal aim while learning science, according to me, should be for ALL students to understand concepts and apply them well. Hence, by gearing our teaching towards a particular group (even if it's the majority) we would be depriving struggling students of the knowledge they deserve, due to their inability to comprehend in a similar fashion.
I guess the question boils down to how far we are willing to go to meet the needs of these students. I will definitely do my best.