Reading science: How a naive view of reading hinders so much else

Abstract

Reading about new scientific findings could serve a useful purpose in citizens’ lives. Therefore, school science education ought to provide sufficient background for citizens to read reports of new scientific findings appearing in the popular press. Citizens should be able to make sense of what they read and make logical inferences about their existing scientific beliefs – whether to maintain or alter them in light of what they have read. In this chapter, we focus on two types of metacognitive judgments made by students reading the popular scientific press: Judgments about the difficulty of the texts to read and judgments about the effect of what they have read on prior beliefs. These judgments can affect how readers subsequently control their reading, a point that will be made clear in several examples. We present data that show that these metacognitive judgments are consistently made poorly by students because, we argue, the students possessed a limited view of the nature and goals of reading. Consequently, the control of their reading also was not effective. Finally, we offer several educational policy implications of this work. This chapter discusses sophisticated reading and provides a measure of the quality of one’s interpretations, of how what one is reading ought to interact with what one already believes, and, more generally, of the stance that one ought to adopt with respect to a text. These judgments can affect how readers subsequently control their reading. The notion of metacognition applied in this chapter thus addresses the monitoring and regulation/control functions of metacognition.