Melissa Mehre

Content Literacy Paper

Education 386
Section 2





The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who
does not know how to learn.
-Alvin Toffler





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What do you want to be when you grow up? This is the question were asked
throughout our youth. Year after year we grow and the answer to this question slowly changes
as we do. When I was in 1
st
grade, I wanted to be a teacher. When I was in 4
th
grade, I wanted
to be a fire-fighter. When I was in 8
th
grade, I wanted to be a scientist. And when I was almost
grown up, a senior in high-school, I was forced to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of
my life. I was an honor student, top of my class; I could do anything I wanted to. I had applied
and was accepted to Marquette University (and University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire). All I could
think of was, How do you get accepted to Marquette University and not go there? So I went.
I spent the next four months trying to keep up with the upper class of the East coast and
Chicago. My parents arent doctors or lawyers, so keeping up with my peers was more than
difficult for me financially, but also mentally. I didnt like the person I was slowly becoming
the type of girl who needed to have expensive clothes and fancy gadgets. On top of everything,
I missed my friends and family from home. I came home over Thanksgiving break during that
fall semester of my freshman year and really reflected on what I wanted from my life. I spent
the next three days researching different occupations I had been interested in when I was
younger and what local colleges had to offer. On Sunday, about an hour before I needed to
meet my carpool to head back down to Milwaukee, I sat down with my parents to tell them
what I had decided. I told them I was upset at Marquette and wanted to transfer to UW-
Stevens Point. They asked what I wanted to do there, and I replied I want to be a teacher.
We didnt have much time to talk about it, so I returned to Milwaukee and started filling out
the application. I sent it in and received my acceptance a couple of weeks later. As
disappointed as my dad was, my parents chose to support my decision and I transferred to UW-
M e h r e | 3

Stevens Point for the spring semester of my freshman year. I look back occasionally and
wonder where I would be if I hadnt made this change. I honestly cannot imagine what my life
would look like. I am grateful for the experience Marquette gave me, but I cant imagine being
anywhere but here at UW-Stevens Point.
When deciding on what major to pursue at UW-Stevens Point I looked back at my
interests in high school. I had been on a six year track to become a doctor of physical therapy
when I was at Marquette, and many of my science classes transferred to UWSP. I had always
been interested in math and science, even though it was somewhat uncharacteristic for girls to
be interested in those subjects in high school. I had one phenomenal science teacher in high
school. He was my teacher for sophomore biology, and he taught me more about life than
anyone. One of the most memorable moments in the classroom was a conversation he had
with the class at the beginning of the hour. One day he turned off the music that was always
playing during our five minute passing period and said he had a special lesson to teach us. He
said, Class, when I ask you How are you doing, what do you say? One kid piped up, Sucky, I
have a paper due tomorrow in English and we have that Bio test on Friday. He replied, When
someone asks you a question like that, the answer theyre looking for is Oh Im doing well, how
are you? Theyre not looking for an honest answer from you, theyre just being polite. I
honestly dont think that half of us had ever been talked to like that by a teacher, but it was the
bluntest and most truthful thing I had learned in a long while. Not only did he teach me about
real life interactions that matter, but he inspired a love of science in me. Not all of my
memories of high school science were pleasant ones, however. The next year I had a different
science teacher for chemistry. This teacher taught me a lot about what a teacher should not
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do. He often made jokes at students expense, one time using me as the butt of one of those
jokes. I remember being humiliated and did not want to return to that classroom ever again.
But the next day I showed up and did what I needed to do. Ive looked back on this experience
a couple of times and realized that, if nothing else, it made me stronger personally, but it has
also made me a stronger teacher.
Throughout all of the changes I have made in my college career, Ive been asked many
times, Why teaching? People want to know what makes someone transfer from a doctorate
program at a prestigious private university to an education degree at a four-year public college.
Its hard to explain the various reasons why I wanted to make that big of a change. For starters,
as I mentioned earlier, I did not like the person I was becoming at Marquette. I wanted to
return to the person I had been, a girl from a working-class household who appreciated where
she came from. Along with that, teaching had always been in the back of my mind. My mom
said, when I was a child I was naturally bossy. I like to think of it as being a natural leader. I
often took charge of group projects and felt very intrinsically motivated in school to do well.
My parents never had to bribe me to get good grades; I had a thirst for knowledge. Combining
those two reasons, I want to inspire my students. I want to help them look inside themselves
and find a calling that fits for them. Whether that is in science or English, college or a technical
school, the work force or the armed forces, I want to help students find what motivates them.
As much as I wish I would have had this advice and mentoring before I left for college, I am so
grateful for the experience it gave me and the person I have become because of it. I cant
imagine myself at any other college, with any other major. This is where I belong.
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By reflecting on my past, I can change my future. Since I have looked at both the
positives and negatives of my own education, I can make changes in my future students
educations. If there is anything I want to accomplish in education, it is to inspire my students,
to motivate them to want to learn. Therefore, I have taken time to research the effects of
motivation on content literacy, as well as some helpful vocabulary and comprehension
strategies I plan on using in my future classroom.
The first aspect in affecting student comprehension in the science classroom I would like
to address is motivation. As I said earlier, one of my main goals as an educator is to motivate
my students to want to know more about the world around them, the world of science. A
study by Guzzetti and Bang (2011) highlights this phenomenon in six high school chemistry
classes. Three were experimental groups where the lessons reflected the five features of
inquiry: engaging with scientific questions, developing and evaluating explanations that address
scientific questions, formulating explanations from evidence, evaluating explanations in light of
alternative explanations, and communicating and justifying explanations (Guzzetti & Bang,
2011). The other three classrooms were control groups where the teachers described their
personal instruction style to be inquiry and model based. In addition to the differences in
inquiry intensity of these two classroom types, the experimental and control groups also had
very different content. The experimental classrooms focused on forensic science in order to
teach the basics of chemistry, while the control classrooms focused on classic labs and lectures
to enforce the same objectives of forming predictions, creating hypotheses, completing
experiments, noting observations, and finally making conclusions. Although both classrooms
met the state standards for this course, it is clear that the experimental classroom was more
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interactive and engaging. The main recommendations the authors of this study made for
implications for instruction were as follows: emphasizing interactivity and collaboration in
literacy activity, relating content concepts to ordinary life through a variety of textual forms and
forums, and providing opportunities for learning and practicing higher-order thinking/reading
skills (Guzzetti & Bang, 2011, p. 56). In my instruction, I plan to make my lessons as engaging
and related to real life as possible in order to truly motivate my students.
Another aspect of motivation I would like to address is technology in the classroom.
Clarke and Besnoy describe how integrating Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) into the
classroom helped increase motivation in two social studies classrooms. The authors write,
technology affords us with exciting opportunities to capture students attention (Clarke &
Besnoy, 2010, p. 54). With attention comes motivation. In addition to motivation, however,
the PDAs also assisted students in using literacy strategies such as chunking the text, focusing
on the text, and pacing their reading. In addition, students commented multiple times on how
much they enjoyed the technology, because they felt it gave them control over something in
their education. Finally, the PDAs also allowed for pre-reading, during reading, and post-
reading strategies within the classroom. For example, the students could look at photos of the
upcoming unit and make predictions based on them as well as write directly on the photos.
They could highlight, bold, and underline the text as they read it. Finally, they could beam, or
send an instant message, to someone else in the classroom two questions about the text they
read and then answer the questions. One of the most powerful quotes in this article
summarizes my view on technology: We need to simultaneously teach our students the
technology skills that will enable them to develop the expanding multi-literacy skills that they
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will use in both the present and the future (Clarke & Besnoy, 2010, p. 54). Integrating
technology into the classroom is a very important skill we need to teach our students, however,
it cannot be technology skills solely intended for freshman biologythese skills need to transfer
into the context of other classes and the workplace.
In order to have successful comprehension in the classroom, students must first learn
highly specialized terminology before they can fully understand the subject matter (Misulis,
2011, p. 1). There are many vocabulary integration strategies for the science classroom, but in
order to be successful they must be just thatan integration, not an addition. Educators must
integrate these strategies into every unit so their students have the opportunity to learn and
thrive with these systems.
Next, I would like to explain some strategies for understanding vocabulary that I could
see myself using in my classroom. Graphic organizers, or visual depictions of the relationship
between vocabulary words or concepts, lend themselves very useful in the science classroom
(Misulis, 2011). With the help of a partner, or working as a class, I think graphic organizers can
certainly be integrated into my classroom. Another example of a vocabulary strategy is literal-
level vocabulary activities. These activities involve little to no room for interpretation; so again,
they lend themselves useful to science classrooms where there are a lot of hard and fast details
and facts. Karen Wood and her colleges explain another vocabulary strategy called the Ten
Important Words Plus strategy (Wood, Jones, Stover, & Polly, 2011). This strategy involves the
students reading the provided text, the teacher modeling how to determine key words, and
then the students trying the strategy themselves by picking out the ten most important words.
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Then the teacher posts their words on the white board in bar graph style so students can see
which words were selected the most often. Then the class discusses why particular words were
selected. Finally, each student is required to write a sentence summary for the passage using
the key vocabulary words just identified (Wood, Jones, Stover, & Polly, 2011). This strategy is
great, in my opinion, because it involves the teacher modeling the metacognitive strategies
students will need in order to dissect complex texts on their own in the future. It not only helps
the students understand the content of the class they are in, but it teaches them how to
analyze texts in the future without the help of the teacher. The last vocabulary strategy I came
across, and would like to comment on, is the Personal Clue Card strategy discussed by Young
(2005). In the Personal Clue Card strategy, vocabulary terms that are deemed important are
given to the students, and they must make personal clues, or brain signals, for each core
science term (Young, 2005). An example of this in the biology classroom could be for a unit on
cell structure. For example, I would model to my students that my clue card for the nucleus
would be a recipe book because the nucleus is like the recipe for making proteins and even new
cells. The point of this vocabulary strategy, though, is for each student to make their own clue
card with their own pictures and meanings behind them. This way the students connect the
vocabulary word to something they will remember and associate with. One of my teachers in
high school actually used this strategy in an AP-Psychology class I took. To this day I can still
remember those vocabulary words because of the personal connections I made to them.
Once students have a better understanding of content vocabulary, they can use this
vocabulary to increase their comprehension of text materials. Before I delve into the specific
strategies I have found on comprehension, Id first like to address teacher use and attitude
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towards reading comprehension in the content areas at the middle and high school levels. A
study by Molly Ness concludes that, Reading comprehension instruction in social studies and
science classrooms was essentially absent because these teachers saw reading comprehension
as a time-consuming detraction from their content coverage, or doubted their responsibility for
or skill in providing such instruction (Ness, 2009, p. 158). It is concerning to me that teachers
feel that reading comprehension is not their responsibility, or feel like they cannot integrate it
into their content areas. In my opinion, if a teacher assigns a reading and expects the students
to understand the content in it, that teacher must first be willing to teach the students how to
extract that information from the text. As with the technology integration I mentioned earlier,
reading comprehension strategies must be integrated into the content area classroom, not just
added.
After making the decision to implement reading comprehension instruction into the
content classroom, a teacher is faced with many different strategies. Some specific strategies
that Molly Ness found to have research evidence of increased reading comprehension include
comprehension monitoring, cooperative learning, graphic/semantic organizers, story structure,
question answering, question generation, summarization, and multiple strategy instruction
(Ness, 2009). I can see comprehension monitoring, or teaching students how to be aware of
their understanding while reading, cooperative learning, where students work in groups to
learn strategies to dissect text, obviously graphic and semantic organizers, as explained earlier
in this paper, question answering and generating, and summarization of reading, as well as
combining multiple strategies in a classroom being very useful in the science classroom. In
addition to these strategies suggested by Molly Ness, there is also research to support web-
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based activity integration of comprehension strategies with for increasing content literacy.
Boxie and Maring conducted a study where eighth-grade students in an earth science class
completed the Dynamic Earth Project with the web-support of four pre-service teachers at a
local university (Boxie & Maring, 2002). The students worked in small groups, utilizing the
cooperative learning strategies, effectively teaching other groups their literacy strategy. They
then completed K-W-L charts to document what they know, what they want to know, and they
finished them after the project about what they have learned. The students then researched
what they wanted to learn about and outlined their facts into groups. Finally students
completed their essays on their chosen topics. At every stage of this Dynamic Earth Project the
students were in contact with the pre-service teachers and received helpful feedback about
their ideas and performance on each task. This project is unique in a few ways: the students
came up with their own topics to write about, giving the students ownership, cyber-partnership
created an environment that encompassed both literacy and technology, and the students
ended the project with better metacognitive strategies and self-awareness (Boxie & Maring,
2002).
Throughout this paper I have discussed motivation as well as vocabulary and
comprehension of content literacy materials. The most important idea in relation to motivation
that I have taken from these professional journals is that interactivity and collaboration are
huge motivating forces. When students are allowed to interact with content, as well as their
peers, in order to learn new information then they will be more engaged in the learning.
Another hugely motivating factor was technology. Educational technology is such a strong
motivating force, because students want to get their hands on this technology in whatever form
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we can offer it: from PDAs in the study by Clarke and Besnoy or iPads or even laptops. It is so
important to integrate these technology related skills into our curriculum not only for
motivation though, it is also important for students to know how to use these forms of
technology for their life after school whether that be college, the work force, a technical school,
or the armed forces. In addition to motivation, there were many key ideas in relation to
vocabulary and comprehension within content texts. There were many vocabulary strategies,
from the Ten Important Words Plus strategy to the Personal Clue Card strategy, that I have
learned about that I can see myself using in my future. There were also many comprehension
strategies, from graphic organizers to summarization, that I plan on integrating into my
classroom. More important than the strategies, however, I have learned that teacher-led and
teacher-modeled demonstration of how to use these particular strategies is the most important
aspect. The metacognitive skills that I can teach my students are the most important aspect of
content literacy.
As well as providing a better understanding of content text materials through strategies
of vocabulary and comprehension instruction, these strategies also fulfill the content standards
of the science discipline. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction requires students of
the eighth grade level to develop their understanding of the science themes by using the
themes to frame questions about science-related issues and problems (Wisconsin's Model
Academic Standards for Science). Clearly the comprehension strategies I have listed above
from Nesss research, including question answering, question generation, and summarization,
fall into the category of developing students understanding of science themes through
questioning. These strategies are both necessary to improve comprehension and therefore
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retention of content information, but they also support the science disciplines performance
standards. In addition, almost three-quarters (45 of 63) of the science disciplinary performance
standards for eighth grade students required the students to use content literacy standards and
included key words such as explain, describe, defend, design, etc. (Wisconsin's Model Academic
Standards for Science). Clearly it is important to integrate content literacy strategies into the
classroom in order for students to retain more of the information they are receiving through
text, but it is also being required by the disciplinary standards teachers are held to uphold. It is
evident that these are important concepts for content area teachers and should be integrated
into the classroom as such.
Alvin Toffler could not have said it better when he said, The illiterate of the future will
not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn. It
is our job as educators to inspire our students; it is also our job to make sure they know how to
learn. An inspired student has the want to learn, but not necessarily the tools to know how to
learn. Throughout this paper, I have discussed articles on motivation as well as content literacy
strategies. To me, it is not just about inspiring students, it is also about giving them the tools
they need to know how to learnthe tools they need to be successful, making them literate by
Tofflers definition. As a teacher, I will strive to not only motivate my students, but also teach
them the vocabulary, comprehension, and metacognitive skills they need to be successful in
their futures.


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References

Boxie, P., & Maring, G. H. (2002). Using Web-Based Activites to Enhance Writing in Science: The Dynamic
Earth Project. The Teacher Educator, 99-110.
Clarke, L. W., & Besnoy, K. D. (2010). Connecting the Old to the New: What Technology-Crazed
Adolescents tell us about Teaching Content Area Literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education,
47-56.
Fleming, D. M., Unrau, N. J., Cooks, J., Davis, J., Farnan, N., & Grisham, D. L. (2007). A California State
University Initiative To Improve Adolescent Reading in All Content Areas. Teacher Education
Quarterly, 5-16.
Guzzetti, B. J., & Bang, E. (2011). The Influence of Literacy-Based Science Instruction on Adolescents'
Interest, Participation, and Achievement in Science. Literacy Research and Instruction, 44-67.
Misulis, K. E. (2011). A Place for Content Literacy: Incorporating vocabulary and comprehension
strategies in the high school science classroom. The Science Teacher, 47-50.
Ness, M. K. (2009). Reading Comprehension Strategies in Secondary Content Area Classrooms: Teacher
Use of and Attitudes Towards Reading Comprehension Instruction. Reading Horizons, 143-161.
Wood, K., Jones, J., Stover, K., & Polly, D. (2011). STEM literacies: Integrating reading, writing, and
technology in science and mathematics. Middle School Journal, 55-62.
Young, E. (2005). The Language of Science, The Language of Students: Bridging the Gap with Engaged
Learning Vocabulary Strategies. Science Activities, 12-17.