Learning to Read Scientific Text:Do Elementary School Commercial Reading Programs Help?

摘要

This paper describes a comprehensive set of studies designed to assess thepotential for commercial reading programs to teach reading in science. Specific questionsfocus on the proportion of selections in the programs that contain science and the amountof science that is in those selections, on the genres in which the science is portrayed,on the areas and topics of science covered, on the accuracy of the scientific content, onthe text features used to communicate the science, and on the instructional strategies andassessment techniques recommended. The findings show that commercial reading programshave changed substantially from the days when they were dominated by literary texts arylcontained hardly any science. Now, there is a variety of genres and scientific contentin about one fifth of the selections. The content is also generally accurate. So, there isconsiderable potential offered by these programs for teaching children to read science.Unfortunately, the findings also show that the recommended instructional strategies andassessment techniques do little to capitalize upon this potential. In particular, the findingsdemonstrate that, although most of the science is cast in the expository genre, most ofthe recommended instruction and assessment is more appropriate to the literary genres