Future Practice
I found this inquiry invaluable to my future practice. Not only is scientific literacy a necessary skill for students to develop to become more engaged and informed citizens, but also I found that students enjoyed and were more engaged learning about current scientific events. There are some areas I would like to further develop.
- Improved scaffolding for reasoning: I found students’ ability to reason the slowest to develop using the base explanation rubric. Although this is to be expected as it requires higher order thinking. I would like to explore different ways of scaffolding students to improve their ability to reason, similar to how I used highlighting to focus on evidence. I am curious if using non-scientific examples would strengthen students understanding of reasoning earlier on and if having examples of prior students work to look could improve students understanding of reasoning.
- A modified Base Explanation Rubric: I would like to look for how improve the base explanation rubric to make it more clear. One change I would definitely make is to separate level 1 and 2 into different sections or to possibly make the rubric scaled from 0-2 rather than 0-3.
- Collaborate with colleagues to create a department wide focus on scientific literacy: Lastly, since scientific literacy is such an important skill, I would like to collaborate with my future coworkers to create a department wide emphasis on scientific literacy. In that way, students would continually develop scientific literacy skills over four years rather then two months.