Reading Belongs in the Science Classroom - I'll tell you why!

As science teachers, most of us didn't get into teaching because we were excited to teach reading. We want students doing labs, analyzing data, asking questions, and learning science. I certainly did not go into teaching science expecting to teach literacy strategies!

But I've realized that sometimes students who appear to struggle with science aren't necessarily struggling with the science itself. They're struggling to understand what the science texts are telling them.

They may understand natural selection when we discuss it but struggle with a passage about antibiotic resistance. They may understand an experiment but have trouble identifying evidence in a written explanation.

The problems here:

Standardized tests include many reading passages

News and media articles they will encounter contain text

They will need to read about science in college, and many more.

So, what does the research say about teaching reading in science?

Reading Is Part of Learning Science

Fang and Wei (2010) compared sixth-grade students receiving inquiry-based science instruction with students whose science instruction also included explicit reading instruction. Students in the combined science-and-reading group performed better on measures of science literacy.

I think that's an important distinction. We don't necessarily need to think of literacy as one more thing we have to fit into science class.

Reading scientific information is part of doing science.

Research on integrated science and literacy instruction has found similar benefits. Cervetti et al. (2012), for example, found that students receiving instruction integrating science investigations with reading, writing, and discussion demonstrated greater gains in science understanding, vocabulary, and science writing than students receiving comparison science instruction.

But Reading Science Is Different

Reading in science isn't just reading paragraphs.

Students have to make sense of technical vocabulary, evidence, graphs, tables, diagrams, models, captions, and data; they often need to connect several of those sources together.

This is where disciplinary literacy becomes important. We can leave general reading skills for our ELA colleagues. Rather than simply teaching students generic reading strategies, we can teach them how to approach information the way we want them to think in science (Pratt & Coleman, 2024).

When my students read, I want them asking:

• What is the main idea or claim?

• What evidence supports it?

• What does this graph, figure, or model add?

• How does the evidence connect to what I already know about science?

What Can We Actually Do in the Classroom?

This doesn't require turning science class into English class.

Start with a reading you're already using.

Instead of telling students to "highlight the important information," give them something specific to look for. Have them identify the main idea, mark evidence that supports it, and explain why that evidence matters.

This is one reason I like using Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) with scientific readings. CER gives students a purpose for reading:

Claim: What is this text ultimately telling me?

Evidence: What information in the text supports that idea?

Reasoning: Why does the evidence support it based on the science I've learned?

The same idea can be applied to graphs, diagrams, and data. Before assuming students know how to interpret a scientific figure, we can model what we notice when we look at it.

The goal isn't to make the science easier.

It's to give students the tools they need to access the science.

The Takeaway

Realistically, most of our students aren't going to become scientists. But all of them are going to encounter scientific information.

I want my students to be able to encounter an unfamiliar term and have some idea how to figure it out. I want them to look at a graph and know where to start. I want them to read a scientific claim and look for the evidence behind it.

Teaching students how to read science isn't taking time away from teaching science.

It is teaching science.

References

Cervetti, G. N., Barber, J., Dorph, R., Pearson, P. D., & Goldschmidt, P. G. (2012). The impact of an integrated approach to science and literacy in elementary school classrooms. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49, 631–658.

Fang, Z., & Wei, Y. (2010). Improving middle school students' science literacy through reading infusion. The Journal of Educational Research, 103(4), 262–273.

Pratt, S., & Coleman, J. (2024). Reading like a scientist: Teaching students to strategically read multimodal science texts. Science and Children, 61(1).

If you're looking for an easy way to bring this approach into your classroom, my CER Science Reading Activities are designed to help students practice exactly these skills by identifying claims, gathering evidence from scientific texts, and using their science knowledge to explain their reasoning.