Essay On Science Literacy As A Dialogic Inquiry Process

Science Literacy as a Dialogic Inquiry Process

Built on the definition of scientific literacy in this chapter, science literacy is seen as a dialogic inquiry process and an interpersonal social practice (Heath, 1983, 2012; Street, 1984, 1995). It is more than the individual operation of experiments as a venue of scientific knowledge acquisition (Pearson, et al., 2010, p. 329). This dialogic learning process can be further elaborated in the following three stages.

• First, before the hands-on exploration process, a science inquiry often starts with the teacher’s introduction of the key scientific concepts through using various multimodal texts. Combining the foundational knowledge provided by the teachers and the students’ relevant prior knowledge, the students often proceed to research the scientific topics through reading articles and scientific reports in the library or online.

Their information collection stage is also a social negotiation process during which the group members need to decide what information is helpful to their understanding of the chosen topic and to generate possible research questions or hypothesis based on their curiosity of the topic and the relevance of the research topic to their local research contexts.

• Third, during the students’ science inquiry process, the students often work in groups and engage in group searching for, evaluating, and using scientific texts, to make sense of the scientific concepts involved in the inquiry project, and to possibly continue their exploration or experiment. After the students’ scientific experiments or near the end of their inquiry process, the inquiry group reports their inquiry project process, products, thinking, and experiences through writing and