Abstract:

Promoting comprehensive reading in scientific disciplines necessarily involves understanding its process and development. That is to say, it's important to comprehend which activities and ways of thinking guide the teacher's work, including its impact. It's well recognized that science teachers need to understand this metacognitive activity and how it can assist in this demand. Since science has its own context, it requires students to develop skills in reading expository texts and other skills pertinent to scientific school work (Patterson et al., 2018).

From the perspective of teacher cognition, there's a concern to understand the beliefs that shape the teacher's implicit knowledge in action and how they relate to and influence their explicit teaching practice. These beliefs are largely regulated by them (Pajares, 1992; Cossío & Hernández, 2016; Martinez et al., 2019). Consequently, the construction and characterization of these beliefs can be understood through comprehensive reading models such as process models (Kintsch and Van Dijk, 1978); construction-integration (Kintsch, 1988); constructionist (Graesser et al., 1994); and sociocultural (Snow, 2002), which involve configuring elements like the reader, text, activity, context, and of course, the teacher acting as a mediator.

This presentation shares partial results from the research project FONDECYT 11230631. One of its objectives is to analyze the beliefs about reading comprehension models of scientific text held by 48 chemistry teachers from secondary education (2nd year) in 4 districts of Chile (Metropolitan Region, O'Higgins, Bio Bio, and Viña del Mar), who voluntarily participated in the quantitative study (Creswell, 2014). These beliefs were gathered through the Teaching Scaffolding Reading (TSR) questionnaire (Rojas and Flores, 2023) in this aspect. The data was processed using multiple correspondence analysis and SPSS v. 29 software. The results indicate that chemistry teachers declare a preference for construction-integration models (43.5%) and constructionist models (63%) in their practices of comprehensive reading. This suggests that for the former, the reader is an active agent in the process, as their processing occurs based on prior knowledge and information from the text. Whereas, for the latter model, comprehension is characterized by the type and quality of the representations of the text's meaning, making this goal achievable only when the reader's objectives are explicit, the time taken to comprehend is assessed, and the reader's knowledge is considered. The multiple representations generated in the chemistry class should be coherent enough and closely aligned with the scientific knowledge accepted by the scientific community. Consequently, for teachers, it's important to consider variables that may influence the promotion and development of comprehensive reading, particularly crucial when recognizing chemical scientific language as a challenging task, and therefore, its reading.

Keywords:

Reading comprehension, science text, beliefs teachers, chemistry education.