Why modelling academic writing is just as relevant to science teachers as to those of English or history
‘Literacy strategies’ were all the rage when I started teaching. I attended CPD sessions in which people told me to ask students to write the date in words, BUG their answers to exam questions or unscramble the learning objectives.
As a member of the science department, I gave scant regard to this sort of advice. I think this was a fair response. Unscrambling SUNCLUE (nucleus) may be mildly diverting, but it doesn’t tell students anything about the structure of an atom or cell. Likewise, BUGging an exam question kept students busy, but it didn’t give them much with which they could think about and tackle the question by themselves.
Such wariness towards literacy persists with many science teachers. It’s often seen as something for other subject areas. If we move beyond the idea that literacy is a generic, somewhat mysterious skill, however, and start to think about it as the manifestation of thinking characteristic of each subject, we will see that modelling academic writing is as important a pedagogical tool in science as it is in English or history.
Making connections explicit
Things have got better since the days of tokenistic literacy strategies. As I wrote about in my last blog, books like The Writing Revolution have encouraged teachers to think about how to model academic writing in a more meaningful sense within their specific subject areas.
What’s not always clear is why the kind of strategies outlined by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler are so effective in the classroom. I argued that modelling academic writing works because it allows teachers to draw students’ attention to how individual words capture the logical relationships between concepts within our disciplines.
In history, we saw how the use of adverbs captured the second order concepts characteristic of historical reasoning. By using a word like rapidly, instead of a word like gradually, we highlight the pace of change between historical events, and thus how those events are logically connected within an historical argument.
How would a similar approach work in science? What are the logical structures we hope to make explicit by drawing students’ attention to certain words? I believe the answer lies in so-called ‘command words’.
Command words
Every science teacher is familiar with command words. These are the words characteristic of exam questions: state, describe, explain, calculate, compare, evaluate, and so on.
It’s a truism amongst science teachers that we must ask students to look at the command word and think about how they should answer that question. What is the difference between describing and explaining? What is the difference between comparing and evaluating? What method should we use for calculation questions?
In my experience, it’s less common to see science teachers give students advice on how to answer questions differently according to the command word. What I’ve generally observed are loose exhortations like, “when explaining, you must say why something happens,” or “use your own knowledge.”
The outcome is often that students’ writing does not look discernibly different whether they are describing, explaining, comparing, or otherwise. They know the differences between command words are important, but they do not know how to articulate those differences through their writing.
Modelling scientific explanations
To make these differences explicit, I would argue that we must think about the logical structure characteristic of scientific argument. Perhaps the clearest example is the word “Explain”. In simple terms, scientists offer causal or deductive explanations, in which one thing directly leads to another. Thus, when modelling scientific explanation, i.e. answering Explain questions, we must use causal language and draw students’ attention to it.
I will illustrate how we can do this using an example from biology. The question was Explain why a person with a leaking heart valve has difficult exercising. The first thing I do when modelling a question like this is to highlight the command word. (I’ve used a box but don’t worry: other than that, this is a BUGging free zone.)
When the command word is Explain, I make it clear to students that scientific explanations involve making links between an overall cause and an overall effect. These are both concrete phenomena: they are typically observable or measureable, i.e. things we can see. Scientists try to explain how the overall cause is linked to the overall effect in terms of abstract ideas or scientific models, i.e. things we can’t see.
Thus, whenever I see an Explain question, I note down the overall cause and overall effect within the question, and ask students to think about the kinds of ideas they might use to link them together. In the example above, the overall cause is the leaking heart valve and the overall effect is difficulty exercising. The linking ideas, sketched on the right-hand side, are energy, respiration, oxygen and blood flow.
I make it clear to the students that a logically organised explanation is likely to start with the overall cause and end with the overall effect. Hence my example begins with “If we have a leaking heart valve …” and ends with “Therefore we have difficulty exercising.”
Making the logical structure explicit
The most powerful part of modelling academic writing in science is drawing students’ attention to the use of causal language. One such technique is to use if … then … sentences, which I wrote about in an earlier blog. The if … then … structure is characteristic of deductive, i.e. causal, reasoning, so lends itself well to scientific explanation.
An alternative is to use certain words or phrases which imply a causal relationship. These include “This means that …,” “Consequently,” and “Therefore,” all of which I have used in the example above.
Adding these words to an answer sounds trivial, but they do a lot more work than initially meets the eye. Consider a student who used the word “Subsequently” as a sentence starter instead of “Consequently”. It would not be clear whether the student really understood the causal nature of scientific explanation. “Subsequently” implies a temporal relationship, not a causal one, whereas a robust scientific explanation ascribes one and only one cause to each effect.
If, on the other hand, the command word was Describe, “Subsequently” could be a very useful sentence starter. If a student is describing how food moves through and is broken down by the digestive system, it would make perfect sense to write a sentence like, “Subsequently, the food travels down the oesophagus to the stomach.”
Word choice and layout matter
In a blog post from 2019, Pritesh Raichura noted that processes or sequences can be thought about temporally, causally, or spatially. A useful point to add to this insight is that temporal or spatial relationships can be articulated through scientific descriptions whereas causal relationships can be articulated through scientific explanations.
Raichura goes on to argue that the purpose of drawing diagrams in science is to make such temporal, causal or spatial relationships manifest to students. As I discussed in a previous blog, the layout really matters here. Spatial relationships lend themselves naturally to diagrams; temporal relationships are probably best represented by a chain or timeline; causal relationships can be represented by a 2x2 grid.
The broader point here is that the language we use and draw students’ attention to, along with the way we lay out our diagrams, is not arbitrary. If done thoughtfully, word choice and layout can capture something important and profound about the way scientists think about the world.
To put it another way, they can make manifest the logical connections between concepts in science. Thinking about pedagogical tools like modelling academic writing and dual coding in this way, rather than according to the relatively crude and superficial model offered to us by cognitive psychology, gives teachers a much better hope of building a conceptual framework that lasts in students’ minds.
