Abstract:

The use of reading in school as a learning tool in scientific disciplines requires researching teachers’ beliefs about this practice including how they scaffold it cognitively because it is well recognized that these beliefs configure and establish domains that frame their teaching. Nevertheless, research on schoolteachers’ beliefs around reading in scientific disciplines has been scarce, especially in fields such a Chemistry, Biology and Nature Sciences.

This quantitative study (Mertens, 2015) presents the preliminary results of a study seeking to understand the beliefs of Chemistry, Biology and Natural Science teachers about the role of reading in disciplinary learning situations (Proyect DICYT 031941RR). A questionnaire was designed, validated and applied to a deliberate non-probability sample of 125 Chilean elementary and secondary school teachers (Rojas and Flores, 2020).

The final scale was made up of 32 items with good reliability indicators distributed in two dimensions and five categories:
1) what value do teachers give to the use of reading;
2) what do teachers read for;
3) what do teachers understand by comprehension;
4) what levels of reading do teachers evaluate and
5) what type of cognitive scaffolding do teachers promote.

This article presents the results of the first category. Regarding the value that teachers give to the use of reading (Broncano, 2011) the data shows that Biology and Sciences teachers use reading mainly to exemplify content. On the other hand, the Chemistry teachers declare that they use reading to introduce the content. Although, these functions are important in presenting and reinforcing the content taught, the skills required are less demanding than those required by the elaboration category, for example. It is noteworthy, the scarce use that teachers give to reading for elaboration purposes, which point to the construction of knowledge by students instead of knowledge being introduced by the teacher. The elaboration category is based on a more sociocultural approach to reading in which meaning is built by the student based on his o her previous knowledge in relation to the text. Thus, a stronger use of this category would have been expected. It is expected that results will inform teacher education programs and continuous teacher training courses in this area. Results will be discussed in the light of the literature in the area.

Keywords:

Cience reading, disciplinary literacies, teachers’ beliefs, Chemical, Biology and Nature Science.