WEB GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS AS AN ADVANCED STRATEGY FOR TEACHING SCIENCE TEXTBOOK READING COMPREHENSION

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the 5 months experiment in which the influence of using a web graphic organizer in the science literacy curriculum was observed. The interest of the study was focused on the quality and quantity of learning/understanding the explicatory text description from the science textbook. The experiment included students at the age of 8-9 years. Science and L1 class were integrated for this purpose: teachers were instructed to use web graphic organizer as a tool for visualizing the text structure on the level of concrete cognitive operations. The results show the effect of using the web graphic organizer on students’ competence to find out what in the science textbook text is important, on the level of text comprehension and on the competence of comparing new information with the previous knowledge. Key words: Web graphic organizer, pre knowledge, categorization of concepts, reading comprehension, description, science textbooks.