Investigating Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Designs for Integrated Science/Literacy Instruction Highlighting Similar Cognitive Processes

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways in which preservice elementary teacher candidates designed integrated reading and science lessons that evoked the use of similar cognitive skills in both subjects, such as sequencing, predicting, classifying, or noting cause and effect. The authors provided the candidates with a lesson plan template focused on making meaning for hands-on science activities along with appropriate fiction or nonfiction texts. We used qualitative content analysis to determine the candidates’ (a) general approaches to integrated lesson planning, (b) use of pedagogical moves to promote science understanding and reading comprehension, and (c) use of essential elements of inquiry-based teaching. Results indicated most candidates demonstrated proficiency and creativity in identifying specific pedagogical moves to highlight students’ cognition and metacognition of similar thinking skills and to drive home the science concepts. We discuss the possibilities for using science to leverage reading comprehension and reading to leverage science understandings in elementary classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Elementary
• science literacy
• inquiry

Appendix: Integrated reading/science lesson plan template

Materials and preparation

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Objective and assessments

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Academic language

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Lesson

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