Meaningful Reading Skills for Improvement of Biological Literacy in Primary School

Abstract

Biology is one of the school subjects that is the most saturated with different terms and notions. The young person finds it rather difficult to orient in the diverse offer of information in today's age of information abundance because he has to ``read{''} and assess critically to be able to learn with understanding. The reading literacy of Latvia's 15-year-old students is low; therefore, the aim of the present study is to find out how the improvement of meaningful reading skills applying different reading strategies affects students' biological literacy. In order to explore the mutual relationship a pedagogical experiment was carried out in Riga X gymnasium in 2017. The opinion of 58 students and their teacher of biology about the assessment of students' reading skills was examined by using different reading strategies aimed at improving students' reading skills in the experimental group and checking their level of reading by using PISA tests. Data were processed using the SPPS 23 statistic data processing program. The study findings show that students' level of reading after the application of reading strategies increases and their biological literacy improves.