Text genre as a factor in the formation of scientific literacy

Learning using primary literature may be a way of developing a capacity for scientific ways of thinking among students. Since reading research articles is a difficult task for novices, we examined the possible benefits of learning using primary literature versus secondary literature, particularly with respect to their influence on the creation and formation of scientific literacy. We report on a comparison between four groups of high school students, each with differing degrees of prior knowledge in biology, who read a domain-related text written in either the scientific research article genre (adapted primary literature) or the popular-scientific genre (secondary literature). Although there was no significant difference in the students' ability to summarize the main ideas of each text, indicating that there was no eminent distinction in their content, we found that students who read adapted primary literature demonstrated better inquiry skills, whereas secondary literature readers comprehended the text better and demonstrated less negative attitudes toward the reading task. Since the scientific content of the two texts was essentially identical, we suggest that the differences in students' performances stem from the structure of the text, dictated by its genre. 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 403-428, 2005 The need to create a scientifically literate citizenry is a widely accepted educational goal (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990; Laugksch, 2000; Report of the Superior Committee on Science Mathematics and Technology Education in Israel, 1992; Uno & Bybee, 1994). The question of what constitutes scientific literacy, or what a literate person should know or be able to do, is far more controversial (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1990; Bybee, 1997a; Harlen, Raizen, & deRoo, 2000; Laugksch, 2000; National Research Council, 1996). We chose to use Shamos's definitions for functional and ''true'' scientific literacy (quotation marks in the original) (Shamos, 1995) as our operational definitions of scientific literacy. Functional scientific literacy is characterized by the ability to converse, read, and write coherently in a nontechnical but meaningful context. This definition should not be conflated with the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) definition of functional biol- ogical literacy, which concerns the use of biological vocabulary based on memorized responses (Uno & Bybee, 1994). However, a functional-literate person, according to Shamos, lacks an

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