A key step in helping students to achieve scientific literacy is to ensure that each school's curriculum supports students' efforts to learn science meaningfully. Educational researchers play a vital role in this step by providing teachers, teacher educators, administrators, and policy makers with information about the creation of a curriculum that supports scientific literacy. In a scientific literacy curriculum, reading and writing can serve as dynamic vehicles for learning science meaningfully. The task of educational researchers is to show how reading and writing can be used most effectively to support science learning. Much of what is done now in schools is based on teacher intuition—good intuition—but intuition nonetheless. What is needed is school‐based research to validate and build upon these intuitions. This article is intended to stimulate research on reading and writing to learn science.

Investigated how children cope with some of the demands imposed on them by arithmetic word problems by administering problems modeled after those used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress to 200 6th-graders. A computational demand was imposed on the Ss by adding extraneous information to the problems, whereas a reading demand was imposed on them by increasing the syntactic complexity of the problems. Multiple regression analyses indicated that the Ss' computational ability and reading ability together accounted for 54% of the variance in solution accuracy: Eight and 14%, respectively, of this variance was unique, whereas 32% was common to the abilities. In addition, the analyses indicated that the presence of extraneous information in the problems reduced the accuracy of Ss' solutions. The use of complex syntax had no significant effect on accuracy. The findings suggest that reading ability and computational ability both play important roles in children's successful solution of word problems. The findings also suggest that the presence of extraneous information in word problems can impose a formidable demand on children's limited processing capacities. (14 ref)

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In two experiments, college students wrote preliminary and final drafts of a persuasive document. In Experiment 1, the need for writers to comply with mechanics (i.e., punctuation and spelling), to form complete sentences, and to sequence their ideas, respectively, were eliminated one at a time from preliminary-draft formats. The elimination of sentence-formation and sequence operations produced corresponding increments in persuasive argument production. In Experiment 2, writers with average verbal ability benefited more from the elimination of these structure operations than did writers with low verbal ability. When allowed to choose freely their typical preliminary-draft format, writers with average verbal ability usually selected proposition-based formats (e.g., lists, outlines, and diagrams) that dispensed with the need for structure operations. Writers with average verbal ability also produced more sentences, more arguments per sentence, and fewer mechanics errors than did writers with low verbal ability. In both experiments, preliminary-draft arguments that were transferred during revision constituted the majority of finaldraft arguments; comparatively few new arguments were constructed during revision.

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