Conceptual Learning through Authentic Writing

Are you looking for science activities that can also improve students’ skills to read and write? The author of this article did some research on this topic and wrote about his findings and ... See More

Are you looking for science activities that can also improve students’ skills to read and write? The author of this article did some research on this topic and wrote about his findings and how he implemented reading and writing strategies in his high school science classrooms. Citing the research for why the strategies are best practices, the author shows how he created nontraditional science writing products to initiate his students’ cognitive processes. A list of multimodal student tasks is provided including activities like creating a magazine article for a high school journalism class discussing the structure of the atom, the periodic table of elements, and the relationship between the two; writing a letter to your parents describing a week in the life of a cellular organelle; and developing a travel brochure describing a famous volcano and how it works. The teacher noted that his students enjoyed communicating their knowledge in new ways; they could not “hide behind vocabulary terms” and had to develop their science understandings in order to complete the multimodal tasks. A sample student product is included in the article.