Reproduction Rather than Comprehension? Analysis of Gains in Students’ Science Text Comprehension

Abstract

The use of texts is an indispensable resource for students’ learning, especially in science domains. While developing understanding of a specific topic usually is the main goal of reading expository texts, an important consideration is how to best measure whether this understanding has been reached. In this study, we aimed to analyze gains in students’ reading comprehension based on reading three expository texts on chemistry and physics topics. By means of a pre–post design, we assessed the reading comprehension of 261 eighth grade students with regard to three levels of reading comprehension. Latent change scores were estimated to analyze changes in students’ total test scores, while also calculating difference scores based on the single items. Results indicate that students’ topic-related comprehension increases from pre- to posttest, while gains seem to be limited to word and sentence level questions. In line with other studies, these findings stress that students would benefit from explicit strategy instruction, at least when learning from reading is the goal of using science texts in classrooms.

Perceiving the usage of external representations in physics

“…In addition, the results of Cromley et al (2010a) suggest that the level of text comprehension is influenced by learners' background knowledge like vocabulary, which could also be shown for different science texts. Learners' scientific background knowledge can have a positive effect on their reading comprehension because of their different prerequisites and their effects on strategies and inference as already described previously (see also Härtig et al, 2022). In other words, if a teacher works with several graphs and tables during a physics lesson, not all learners in his or her class might interpret these equally or perceive these as just right, too little or too much in the same way (Opfermann et al, 2017).…”

“…In most science lessons, no matter whether at school or university, external representations such as pictures, tables, formulas, or diagrams are fundamental for learning and teaching of scientific content (Härtig et al, 2022). In this regard, especially multiple representations have been in the focus of research that investigates their relevance for the comprehension of scientific content.…”

Students’ Holistic Reading of Socio-Scientific Texts on Climate Change in a ChatGPT Scenario

“…It refers to students' identification of relationships between elements of the text while these identification of relationships draws on their prior scientific knowledge (Bernholt et al 2023;Van den Broek, 2010). At a lower level, students identify pieces of key ideas from the scientific texts; while at a higher level, students can express in their own words about the most important information drawing on their prior scientific knowledge (Oliveras et al 2013(Oliveras et al , 2014.…”

Comprensión y alfabetización científica en la escuela: Revisión sistemática

“…El hecho de tener una buena comprensión lectora permite a una persona a nivel virtual tener mejores estrategias para poder seleccionar y discernir sobre sitio de internet que brinde credibilidad e información veraz a fin de mejorar la calidad de la argumentación así como un buen rendimiento científico (Castells et al, 2022;Cruz Neri et al, 2021a;Härtig et al, 2022). La interacción entre el lector y el texto depende significativamente de los conocimientos previos y el nivel de lectura que pueda presentar el estudiante (Bernholt et al, 2023;Chang et al, 2021).…”

“…La comprensión de textos científicos siempre ha sido la piedra angular del proceso de enseñanza de las ciencias ya que como plantea Bernholt et al, (2023) un estudiante que comprende un texto y en este caso de tipo científico es capaz de integrar la información obtenida en el texto con sus conocimientos estableciendo relaciones. Partiendo de la verificación sistemática de la bibliografía en la base de datos como Scopus y Web of Sciencie se menciona que la definición de alfabetización científica es dinámica ya que considera los diversos procesos económicos, sociales y culturales que han podido caracterizar diversas etapas de nuestra historia, actualmente se observa la relación de ciencia y sociedad a fin de ser ciudadanos socialmente activos (Costa et al, 2021;Ezquerra et al, 2019), existe información que señala que tanto docente como estudiante presentan problemas en la enseñanza y la difusión de la ciencia (Ezquerra et al, 2019), si bien es cierto acercarse y comprender diversos aspectos de la ciencia se dan a nivel de indagación científica para la comprobación experimental de diversos fenómenos, también es necesaria la comprensión de la naturaleza de la ciencias, problemáticas científicas y socio científicas, así como momentos histórico científicos (García-Carmona, 2021).…”