Effects of prompting critical reading of science news on seventh graders’ cognitive achievement

Abstract

Science teachers frequently select science news articles as supplementary teachingmaterials; however, the literature indicates that students encounter difficulties in examiningand evaluating the news content and textual elements. This paper reports an instructionalstrategy of utilizing science news articles and investigates its effectiveness in enhancingstudents’ cognitive learning outcomes. In this quasi-experimental study, 118 seventhgraders from four classes in one secondary school in Taiwan took part in the Science NewsInstruction (SNI). After eight weeks of instruction about Genetics and Reproduction, allstudents were requested to present their written arguments to the selected science newsarticle. Two of the classes were prompted to link to their science content knowledge (theCK-SNI group, n=56), whereas their counterpart peers were not instructed to link to theirscience content knowledge (the SNI group, n=62). The analysis of students’ writtenartifacts revealed that the CK-SNI group performed significantly better on examining thedata and claims made in the science news, producing warrants of higher quality to supporttheir reasoning about the relationship between data and claims, and providing better reasonsto refute the identified causal textual elements. Furthermore, the results of ANCOVAindicate that the CK-SNI group outperformed the SNI group on the cognitive test, with thelargest improvement at Apply level (ηp2 = .10). We conclude that prompting students toexamine news content based on the content knowledge they learned is effective in fosteringstudents to evaluate the science news critically, and thus make a positive impact onstudents’ cognitive learning.