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Academic Areas & Divisions
Curriculum & Instruction
Deana Scipio – Connections: Science in Narrative Text
Déana Scipio completed her Masters Degree in Curriculum & Instruction in the Spring of 2009. While an M.Ed. student in C&I, Déana spent the first year of the program at IslandWood, completing the Graduate Residency in Education, Environment, and Community. It was at IslandWood where Déana’s concept for her Masters project came into being. Here, she shares with us the concept of her project.
Prior to coming to IslandWood I was a children’s book buyer in San Francisco for two years at an independent bookstore. When I arrived at IslandWood, there was a great library of children’s books for instructors to read in the field with students. Books were used for all sorts of purposes and I was inspired to think of ways to use storybooks to teach science. As part of the Graduate Residency in Education, Environment, and Community we were given the opportunity to do an independent study project. I developed a guide to using books in the field with students.
In an hour-long session, I modeled making connections between the ABCs of Nature (Abiotic, Biotic and Cultural elements of ecosystems and watersheds) and elements of the story. I chose two texts with strong science content as well as rhetorical and plot similarities: The Tin Forest by Helen Ward, and The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer. I modeled making connections and used guided practice with The Tin Forest and then turned the process over to the students with The Salamander Room. Students wrote their connection on sticky notes, which we collected and sorted into the ABC categories.
While at IslandWood, I put my curriculum intervention into practice and collected data on the effectiveness of the instructional method to help students make connections between science and children’s literature. I returned to IslandWood, spending two weeks leading 6 groups per week. In the first week I worked with 57 students, and in the second, 49 students.
I learned a lot from the process of developing and testing this project. I would call it a success in those terms, however I was left with many more questions than I was able to answer. Based upon analysis of the data I was able to implicate three implications: 1. This type of intervention allowed students to develop the skill of making connections between science specific background knowledge and narrative text, 2. Student’s text-to-science connections existed along a continuum of complexity and, 3. Activating background knowledge about reading and science yielded a combination of science and reading comprehension (text-to-text, text-to-world, text-to-self) connections to narrative text.
After completing my M.Ed., I spent the summer in San Francisco working with an educational non-profit helping to implement a 9th grade science curriculum I developed. The experience taught me a lot about finding the balance between content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. I’m starting the PhD program in Learning Science in the Department of Educational Psychology at UW in Autumn 2009. I’m particularly interested in investigating the similarities between the ways that students understand and process new knowledge in science and literacy.
Curriculum & Instruction
