“I am arguing that this decline of attention to Science and Social Studies (seen in US Elementary Education) is also detrimental to Literacy learning. That is that Literacy actually requires, in the long term, strong understanding knowledge of the world. It requires students to know the things that authors assume they know. And so if we don’t have that in place, we don’t have all that vocabulary knowledge that goes with it, in that place, if we haven’t developed students’ ability to read and write inside science and social studies disciplines, then we are actually going to have long term pain,” Nell Duke.

In preparation for the upcoming Michigan English Language Arts Network Institute (MiELA), our team recently watched Nell Duke’s YouTube video called “Speaking Up for Science and Social Studies” Nell K. Duke, Ed.D. is a professor in literacy, language, and culture and also in the combined program in education and psychology at the University of Michigan. She has been named one of the most influential educational scholars in the United States.

We highly recommend you watch her video too! Below the video we have outlined our takeaways.

Three Reasons Science and Social Studies are Important to Literacy Learning According to Nell Duke.

Reason #1

Knowledge gained from science and social studies impacts reading and writing.

“If you lack relevant knowledge related to what you are reading, it can be very difficult to comprehend it,” says Nell Duke.  In her video Nell discusses a study by Recht and Leslie (1988) that showed poor readers who had a high knowledge of baseball out performed good readers that had a low knowledge of baseball. Many studies and research confirm this point that world knowledge greatly impacts comprehension.

Why? The more diverse a persons world knowledge is, the better they are with processing new vocabulary, generating inferences, creating coherence, and building situational models.

Reason #2

Science and social studies provide text that is engaging, plus they have been proven to improve teaching reading and writing.

A study by Gaultney (1995) found that students had a higher comprehension and recall when the students were knowledgeable about the topic of the text.

Project PLACE found a 63% gain in Social studies and a 23% gain in informational reading. “What this tells us is that we were able to foster informational reading development in the context of social studies education,” says Nell. The study also saw gains in informational writing.

Reason #3

Science and social studies are essential to professional reading and writing.

When you look at the work of science and social studies professionals, you will notice that a lot of their work involves reading and writing.

Recommendations from Nell Duke

• Elementary teachers should build 45 minutes into each day for science and social studies lessons.
• Teachers shouldn’t pull out for literacy or math interventions during science and social studies lessons. Why? “Because even as those interventions might be helping them, at least in literacy it might be helping them in some regards, they are also taking away from their achievement, because they are not getting those opportunities to develop rich science and social studies knowledge.” For some students their excitement of science and social studies is what keeps them engaged in school.
• Teach more of your literacy in science and social studies lessons. She suggests using literacy skills, knowledge, and practices to process informational text. Have students build understanding and gather information along with text in science and social studies everyday.

Where can you put science and social studies into the day AND bolster the importance of literacy knowledge?

Cautionary Advice from Nell Duke

1. “Content-rich” ELA curricula is not a substitute for science and social studies lessons. Why? ELA curricula is not written by science and social studies experts. It often misses many grade-level standards or even whole disciplines within science and social studies. And it generally doesn’t include processes in science and social studies.
2. Knowledge building is not “THE” answer to our literacy problem. Why? Understanding the importance of knowledge building does not require educators to ignore the values of other literacy strategies.
3. Poor quality science and social studies instruction will not produce great results. Why? High quality instruction and curriculum materials in science and social studies produce the greatest results according to the research. “We have strong professional development in science and social studies so that we have the knowledge the background the understanding of these domains that allow for high quality implementation of the curriculum materials that we have.” Nell Duke

Answer the call!

Nell Duke is calling for the education field to speak up for science and social studies! On June 24 and 25, Kent ISD will answer her call.

This year the annual MiELA Network Institute will focus on the connection of science and engineering, digital, and disciplinary literacy instruction. We hope you take the time to watch the Nell Duke video and sign up for the MiELA conference. Click here to reserve your seat today.

#MiELAnetwork #MichiganLiteracy #Science #SocialStudies #WeLeadLearning #KentISDpd

This blog post was written in collaboration by Wendi Vogel, Science Consultant,  Mark Raffler, Literacy and Social Studies Consultant, and Amanda Walma, Professional Development Coordinator at Kent ISD.