In high school, I struggled to read nonfiction and avoided science whenever possible. Reading a science textbook was like being sucked into quicksand. My eyes would glaze over, and the words would stop making sense. I concluded that science was boring.
When my students struggle to read science passages on the SAT, my job is to show them that there is a way into these seemingly incomprehensible passages. They need to be able to track the “story” of whatever’s been discovered or invented, and they need to be able to identify the hypothesis, the method used to test that hypothesis, and the outcome.
The first thing I tell students is that science isn’t boring to scientists, even if it might be to them. The reader’s job is to assume that the topic is fascinating--even if only to other people. So, it’s their job as readers to assume--or pretend--that the topic is fascinating, or at least important enough to take up someone’s time.
Second, writing that’s full of numbers, words in italics, or chemical formulas is harder to read than texts that contain only words. I recommend labeling difficult names “A,” “B,” and “C” because it doesn’t matter what the thing to which they refer is called. What matters is its role in the narrative of the scientific story being told.
SAT guru Erica Meltzer explains that many science and social science writers follow an old idea/new idea template: “people used to believe x, but now they believe y.” In other words, the “old idea” provides an entry point that allows writers to contextualize new research within the larger body of scientific knowledge so that readers understand why it is worthwhile and relevant.
For example, a passage about circumnavigating the world might begin, “For centuries, people believed the world was flat.” Then, the author will use transition words, such as however, in other words, or recently, to signal the change to the new idea. I teach students to circle all the transition words in a passage because they provide a roadmap to its main idea.
After transitioning to the new idea, writers will typically describe how scientists set out to test the new idea, or hypothesis. Then, they explain what happened during the experiment and how it proved or disproved the hypothesis. Most often, they end by saying that the results are not definitive and that more work needs to be done.
These tips work! I am more confident in my ability to understand science passages and to teach them effectively to my students. Breaking the passage into its parts--old idea, transition, new idea, hypothesis, experiment design, experiment results, and conclusion--allows students to see that science writing follows a formulaic narrative structure just as “once upon a time” signals a fairy tale.
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