Textos e leitura na educação em Ciências: contribuições para a alfabetização científica em seu sentido mais fundamental. / Science education texts and reading: some contributions to the fundamental sense of scientific literacy.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

Language is one field of science education research that has received a lot of attention lately. This is revealed by an increase in the number of papers that deal with this subject (Carlsen, 2007). One of the topics related to language in science education that still need to be further explored is reading and writing in science. Here, some questions that can represent border knowledge are: How school science texts can be characterized? Is there any relation between these texts and their reading comprehension? Possible answers to these questions have dealt with the linguistic features of science texts (Merzyn, 1987; Unsworth, 2001), or have emphasized non fiction genres (Keys, 1999; Hand et al, 1999), or have explored newspaper articles on science education (Wellington, 1991; Norris e Phillips, 1994; Phillips e Norris, 1999; Ratcliffe, 1999). In this work we follow a different pathway: we focus our attention on reading comprehension. Here we assess 14-15 years old students reading comprehension through some tests. The students were randomly assigned to read either a textbook or a popular science article passage about the same subject. We analised readers performance on knowledge tests, on application tests and readers attitudes toward the text. We have also analised some structural features of the texts. The popular science article readers performed better than their peers and girls performed better than boys. Our analyses indicate that the popular science article readers tend to more successfully integrate their previous knowledge with the new information presented in the text. According to vanDijk and Kintsch (1983) discourse comprehension model this evidence these readers are constructing more complete representations about the situations presented in the text. In order to further understanding the observed learning differences we explored readers factors, such as attitudes toward the texts, reading skills and previous knowledge. None of these factors suffice us to understand the observed reading comprehension differences. On the other hand we verified very strong differences in some texts features. Our thesis is that the observed reading comprehension differences can be a consequence of differences in reading processes, triggered by some elements of the texts that were readen.

ASSUNTO(S)

scientific literacy gênero science education texts alfabetização científica educação em ciências leitura texto reading genre

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