Abstract
Science education policies have promoted the role of science literacy practices, including reading, writing and reasoning with science texts, to advance inquiry-based learning in science education. Learning science through news is a promising approach. Since news provides meaningful real-life context, it stimulates the process of active questioning and learning science while fosters science literacy practices. Previous studies have reported that news improves science learning. However, they also reported some barriers to implement news as a teaching resource. The Space Scoop website is an innovative resource as it is specially designed to bring the latest astronomy news to young readers in the form of short, easy-to-understand stories. In this study, we conducted structured interviews in order to understand opinions of teachers and educators (N = 20) about Space Scoop as a teaching resource. This research also investigated the advantages and disadvantages of Space Scoop as compared to general news resources for science learning. Tests were conducted on Space Scoop articles to measure the readability of the articles. Our findings showed that Space Scoop is suitable for young children and motivates them to study science. Space Scoop has overcome the main barriers to teaching with news, namely, the advanced reading level and unreliability of information. Evidence from this exploratory study indicates that Space Scoop supports inquiry-based learning, improves science literacy skills and promotes lifelong learning. An in-depth study with expanded sample in the future would provide further evidence and understanding of how science news like Space Scoop supports science education.
Highlights
Science learning via a hands‐on, inquiry‐based approach is well established as an effective way of gaining scientific knowledge (National Science Teachers Association, 2004)
Such a study would accurately reflect the effectiveness of Space Scoop as a learning resource and help us better understand the impact of news articles on science education
This study confirmed that teachers highly appreciate Space Scoop and used it for teaching in various creative ways, even though the theme of Space Scoop is astronomy, which is not always a specific subject in the school curriculum
Summary
Science learning via a hands‐on, inquiry‐based approach is well established as an effective way of gaining scientific knowledge (National Science Teachers Association, 2004). Science is not all about practical experiments: scientists do need to read about previous investigations in order to frame new research, and reading and writing are indispensable means for scientists to inquire about scientific phenomena (Pearson et al, 2010). In this sense, writing, reading and reasoning with science texts, which are fundamental science literacy practices, are part of the scientific inquiry process and are essential for students to understand core science concepts and their development (Krajcik & Sutherland, 2010). Science education should take care to ensure that students can understand a science phenomenon through reading and can construct and
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