Reading

Reading in content areas is also referred to as subject matter reading and disciplinary reading and embodies what educators call "reading to learn." These terms refer to reading, understanding, learning, and using content area, subject matter, or disciplinary texts such as texts in science, history, or literature, for the purpose of gaining, demonstrating, and possibly creating knowledge in that discipline. Proficiency in reading content area materials is influenced by: (1) the dispositions of individuals who read in the disciplines (including such influences as their levels of background and strategy knowledge, their understanding of the discipline, their attitudes and interest in the subject matter, and their ability levels); (2) the goals that students adapt for learning and the degree to which those goals are similar to the goals that their teachers have for their learning; (3) the structure, difficulty level, and tone of the texts; (4) the level of understanding required of the individuals (for example, memorization versus critical thinking); and (5) the form in which that understanding is displayed (such as written versus oral or recall versus recognition). Thus, reading content area materials involves complex processes.

Educators often state that "reading to learn" is different from "learning to read." When students learn to read, the focus is often on the pronunciation and comprehension of narrative texts. Comprehension of these narratives does not usually require expertise in literary criticism and interpretation, although teachers seek literal, inferential, and evaluative/applied understandings. Reading to learn, however, focuses on the understanding and use of largely informational texts in disciplines such as history and science and a mix of informational and literary texts in English. Reading to learn does require disciplinary expertise. When reading a literary text, for example, students benefit from knowing how literary critics think about and discuss literature as a guide to their own interpretation and discussion of that text. When reading a history text, students benefit from understanding the way that historians gather and interpret data and write about historical events. Reading to learn science requires a different set of understandings than reading to learn history, literature, or any other subject matter.

Level of background knowledge, interest, goals, and other student characteristics make a difference in how well students are able to understand and use the information in texts, but content area reading specialists disagree about the degree to which the approach to reading differs depending upon the discipline. Strategies for understanding and applying what is read will have some commonalties across disciplines; generally, however, the understanding of disciplinary texts is inextricably tied to understandings of the discipline.

In a 1997 article Patricia Alexander posited that disciplinary expertise is gained as a function of three interdependent influences–knowledge, interest, and strategy use. That is, as one increases, the others do as well. Alexander described three levels of disciplinary expertise. At the level of acclimation, knowledge is unorganized, strategies are general, and interest is extrinsic. At the level of competency, knowledge becomes organized (such as into processes in science), strategies become more specific, and interest becomes more intrinsic. At the level of proficiency, one may even create knowledge, strategies will not only be more specific but also become fluid and very efficient, and interest will be very closely tied to one's inner desires. Students may move from acclimation to competency because they get hooked on a topic and that hook helps them become more interested in other topics, because they develop strategies that help them learn more effectively, or because they may learn more and, thus, understand how better to use strategies for learning. In any event, knowledge, interest, and strategy use are tied to the discipline rather than being seen as general constructs.

Reading in Three Disciplines: History, Science, and Literature

Disciplines differ in their methods for creating and displaying knowledge. In addition, teachers in the disciplines expect students to understand those differences and to use them in learning information from texts.

The case of history. History texts are traditionally written as narratives that are sometimes interspersed with interpretation. For example, an event such as the Tonkin Gulf incident of the Vietnam War may be described sequentially, followed by a paragraph discussing the importance of the event in determining U.S. involvement in the war. Students often read historical texts as if they were "baskets of facts" to be memorized in sequential order, but this strategy is naive. Historians, when asked to read historical texts, read them differently. In a 1992 article Samuel Wineburg reported that historians read historical texts as arguments. When reading several historical documents, they engaged in sourcing (determining the expertise of the author and the source of the material), contextualization (determining when it was written and what surrounding influences there might be), and corroboration (determining whether or not the texts agreed).

The differences in the way students and historians read the documents can be attributed to differences in disciplinary expertise. That is, historians know the way that historical evidence is collected. They understand that there is the danger of bias in the selection process of that evidence. They also know that original documents are sometimes difficult to interpret. The documents are like pieces of a puzzle that must be assembled without a preexisting border, with the final picture being a creation of the historian. In interpreting those original documents historians are influenced by the time period in which they live, the political and philosophical approaches they have embraced, and past historical interpretations, to name a few influences. In addition, historians understand the power relations that exist among historians. They know what counts as good historical writing, model their own writing on that of others, and examine the writing of their fellow historians accordingly. Historians understand the elements of their discipline and thus read historical texts with a critical eye.

But the processes of selecting and interpreting historical evidence and writing about historical events is hidden from the reader of historical texts. In presenting history as a coherent story, this information is obscured. Therefore, it is up to teachers of history to call to the attention of students the elements of the discipline that will help them engage in reading history.

What are students required to do when they read history texts? Typically, students are expected to engage in several levels of understanding of history as a result of reading historical texts. These include a mastery of the "facts" of history. They include understanding consensual interpretations of history, such as understanding various historians' ideas of the causes and effects of important events. They also include students' engagement in thinking about these interpretations for themselves. Students in history classes are often asked to make comparisons and contrasts and to discuss possible cause-and-effect relationships that have not been made explicit in the texts. Students are also often required to synthesize information across several texts. For instance, they may be required to read Benjamin Franklin's writings and decide in what ways his ideas had embodied the principles of the Enlightenment. Sometimes students are asked to look at history from different perspectives. For instance, they may be required to read several versions of an event to consider how the context of those writings influenced understanding about it. Students sometimes are asked to engage in the gathering of and interpretation of historical evidence and to write their interpretations in report form, such as in a term paper. Finally, students are sometimes required to engage in thinking about the philosophical aspects of historical understanding. For example, they may be asked to consider whether important people create noteworthy events or whether noteworthy events create important people.

The tradition in history classes for demonstrating these various understandings turns increasingly toward essay writing as students move from naivete to expertise and from lower-level mastery of factual information to higher-level critical thinking and interpretation. Thus, students need to have a complex array of strategies for understanding historical texts and for demonstrating that understanding. These include strategies for remembering the facts of historical events, engaging in historical research, making comparisons and contrasts, synthesizing information across texts, writing essays, and thinking critically about the nature of history and historical writing. Whereas these strategies share common elements with strategies needed for other disciplines, they are, in the end, discipline specific.

The case of science. The hard sciences such as physics and biology rest on the assumptions of the scientific method. Scientists understand and use the scientific method in their search for "truth." They adhere to the principle of objectivity, understanding that their own biases and perceptual shortcomings may cause misinterpretations of evidence. Thus they engage in experimentation using controlled conditions whenever possible and rely on numerical rather than qualitative assessments of data as the main determinants of scientific principles. Yet, as scientists, they are still influenced by several constraining elements. The selection of research topic, the use of certain measurement devices, the importance assigned to various scientific findings, and the previous understandings of the research topic are all examples of constraints that are in part culturally and socially based. Which topics get studied and which findings gain acceptance in the scientific community are functions of power relations among scientists, of necessity, and of the veracity of the findings. As an example, consider that it took hundreds of years for the ideas of the seventeenth century Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei to be accepted by the scientific community, or that sterilization procedures were staunchly resisted by the scientific community despite evidence that such procedures were necessary.

Also in science, information is always partial and relational. Because the workings of the natural world are obscured for individuals by the limits of their perceptual and sociocultural understandings, scientific understandings are always in a state of flux. For example, the ideas about gravity and motion formulated by the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) are functional on Earth but have become outmoded based upon newer conceptions of quantum physics. Scientists understand this flux; they have the disciplinary knowledge necessary to help them critically read and evaluate scientific texts. They also know what counts as written proof of a scientific finding. For example, they know that the reporting of a scientific finding in the journal Science requires adherence to certain traditional rules for scientific reporting and has been anonymously reviewed (refereed) by a group of distinguished scientists. They know that such a report counts more than the accounting of similar findings in a local, nonrefereed publication. Students, however, do not have the disciplinary knowledge necessary to make these evaluations. Skillful reading of science is in part dependent upon students gaining that disciplinary knowledge.

What are students required to do as they read science texts? Typically, they are required to master a knowledge base that represents the current understandings of the scientific community. These understandings involve the identification of various elements and their function in carrying out common processes. For example, students are required to identify the parts and understand the workings of the human digestive system. They are also often required to solve problems or to make predictions about processes based upon their scientific understandings. For example, a student who understands the path of a projectile and how it is calculated might be asked to determine the time it would take a projectile to reach the ground if it were launched at a certain speed at a certain trajectory from a certain height. In other words, students must be able to understand the vocabulary and concepts of what they read and apply that understanding in new contexts.

In trying to understand the processes of science, students may need to suspend their own ideas in favor of scientific evidence. In the study of gravity, for example, students often have erroneous conceptions of how gravity works based upon their intuitive but scientifically disproven assumptions. Students may believe that a heavier object will fall faster than a lighter one, when, in reality, weight or mass do not influence the speed of a projectile as it falls to Earth. Scientists know that weight has no influence because they have performed controlled experiments. Students must suspend their intuitive beliefs to learn the scientific information, and those who understand the assumptions of the scientific method will more likely engage in that learning than students who do not.

Science texts are often seen as difficult to understand. Students complain that concepts are not sufficiently elaborated, the material assumes a level of background information that exceeds theirs, the vocabulary is too dense, and the content is dull. Texts are even harder to understand when students begin their reading harboring misconceptions about the content that interfere with their understanding. Researchers have found that refutational text, or text that explicitly describes erroneous understandings and explains why they are erroneous, is more effective at helping students to learn counterintuitive ideas.

The procedures in science classes for demonstrating students' understandings are varied, including answering literal, inferential, and applied questions on multiple-choice tests; solving numerical problems; writing descriptive essays; writing field notes; making charts, graphs, and diagrams; and writing scientific reports. Students are required to have elaborative understandings of current conceptions of the working of the natural world, and they must have a number of strategies for learning at their disposal.

The case of literature. Literature has its own disciplinary traditions. Knowledge of the way that literary experts refer to such elements as genre, characterization, theme, conflict, symbolism, and language use is important. In addition, experts in literature often engage in various kinds of interpretation, for example, putting a feminist, Marxist, Freudian, or postmodern spin on the interpretation of a piece of literature. Experts in literature understand the different perspectives that are part and parcel of the field. They understand that literary criticism has evolved over time; that the relationship of the author, the text, and the reader and their importance in interpretation have fluctuated; and that arguments rage over what is important for students to read (the canon versus multicultural literature, for example). Students may not have this disciplinary knowledge but would benefit by it.

Students need to develop a common language with which they can discuss and write about their interpretations of text, and the tradition in literature classes is for the demonstration of disciplinary expertise to be in essay form. In addition, they are often expected to apply their knowledge of the elements of certain genres by engaging in writing literary texts themselves, such as in writing poetry or short stories. And they are sometimes required to write reports about authors or certain literary traditions. The strategies for engaging in these activities are quite complex, and, although they require literal, interpretive, and applied/evaluative thinking, the way in which this thinking is used is different from the way it is used in history and science.

The three disciplines–science, history, and literature–are similar in that all require thinking at literal, inferential, and applied/evaluative levels. In addition, reading texts in these disciplines requires vocabulary knowledge and strategic effort. But the disciplines are different. For example, science is well-structured, history less well-structured, and literature relatively unstructured in relation to what is agreed upon as being "known."

Strategies for Reading Content Area Texts

When discussing strategy use, educators find it useful to make a distinction between teacher-generated and student-generated strategies. In both cases, however, content area specialists argue about whether general strategies can be used and applied across subject areas or whether strategies must be discipline specific. In reality, probably both ideas are true.

An example of a teacher-directed strategy is list-group-label. In this pre-reading strategy, the teacher solicits and makes a list of all the information students already know about the content of what they are about to read. Then, she directs the students to group the items in the list into meaningful groups and to label each meaningful group. From this activity, the teacher finds out what the students already understand and can, thus, be more effective in bridging any gaps between information in the text and student knowledge. In addition, the activity can be used to generate a list of questions that might be answered by the text. These questions would then make reading a more directed and interesting activity. The strategy can be applied across contents, but the lists that are generated and the way the lists are used might differ depending upon the discipline. For example, in a history class, groups may include events, policies, and people. In science they may include patterns of behavior or processes.

Regarding student-generated strategies, to be successful in classes in any discipline, students must read with the purpose of understanding and thinking about the information at deep levels, organizing the information into meaningful units, remembering the information, and displaying their knowledge in various ways. Strategies such as previewing, annotating, and outlining help students identify important information to study; strategies such as charting, mapping, and concept cards help students to organize material across sources in meaningful ways; strategies such as verbal rehearsal help students to remember and think about the material; and strategies such as predicting and answering exam questions help students prepare for displaying their knowledge. If students think at literal, inferential, and applied/evaluative levels, they will be more likely to truly learn new information. But even though all of these strategies can be applied across content areas, they will, in practice, be different depending upon the content of the material. Evidence that strategy use in one discipline can be transferred to other disciplines without explicit instruction in strategy modification is rare, and so it seems necessary that students should get explicit strategy modification instruction in each discipline.

In conclusion, the more discipline knowledge they possess, the more content knowledge they have, the more they are interested in the subject matter, the more familiarity they have with the way knowledge is created and structured in a particular discipline, and the more closely their goals for learning match disciplinary goals, the more likely it is that students will be able to adapt general strategies or create new ones to meet their discipline-specific needs for learning and applying the information in their content area texts.