What’s a Science Student to Do?

Abstract

What’s a Science Student to Do? Tenaha O’Reilly (toreilly@odu.edu) Danielle S. McNamara (dmcnamar@odu.edu) and The Strategies Lab Psychology Department, Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA 23529 USA Abstract This study examined the influence of cognitive ability and student activities on high-school students’ science achievement. Students (n=1651) from four high schools in three states were assessed in terms of their cognitive abilities (i.e., science knowledge, reading skill, and metacognitive reading strategies), course involvement, reading interest, and TV habits. Science achievement was measured in terms of students’ course grade, comprehension of a science passage, and performance on a statewide standards of learning (SOL) test. Course involvement significantly predicted only course grade, whereas reading interest predicted SOL scores and science passage comprehension. Cognitive abilities and TV habits predicted all three of the student achievement measures. However, the effects of these cognitive variables interacted in interesting ways. Introduction In recent years, scientists have become increasingly interested in uncovering factors that are important for predicting educational success (e.g., Buckner, Bassuk, & Weinreb, 2001; Herman & Tucker, 2000). For example, researchers have reliably predicted academic achievement with measures of student personality (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001; Stewart, Bond, Deeds, Westrick, & Wong, 1999), parental influence (Hoge, Smit, & Crist, 1997), social economic status (Jimerson, Egeland, & Teo, 1999), and school demographics (Sutton & Soderstrom, 1999). While this line of research has certainly shed light on how student personality and social factors can impact a child’s education, the utility of this information is questionable if the goal of scientific inquiry is to improve scholastic prosperity. Most personality characteristics and social factors are relatively stable; very few introverts quickly turn into extroverts, and even fewer people increase their level of social economic status overnight. In contrast, the investigation of more mutable influences such as cognitive abilities may provide a promising direction for improving academic performance. The purpose of this work was to examine the impact of three cognitive factors on students’ success in their science courses: reading skill, science knowledge, and knowledge of metacognitive reading strategies. It is generally assumed that reading skill is a critical component of academic achievement. Skilled readers are more likely to monitor their comprehension and use active reading strategies such as previewing, predicting, making inferences, drawing from background knowledge, and summarizing (Long, Oppy, & Seely, 1994; McNamara, 2001; Oakhill, 1984; Oakhill & Yuill, 1996). In addition, skilled readers tend to have more knowledge about the world – most likely from reading more often. Readers’ domain knowledge can have a dramatic impact on how well new information is acquired (Bransford & Johnson, 1972). For instance, many school texts are incomplete because they fail to make relations amongst concepts in the text explicit (Beck, McKeown & Gromoll, 1989). Accordingly, domain knowledge can facilitate comprehension by providing the reader with the necessary resources to fill in conceptual gaps (McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996). In addition, readers with greater prior knowledge are more likely to use effective reading strategies (Lundeberg, 1987) and convey greater interest in the reading material than low-knowledge readers (Tobias, 1994; Zhang, & Zhang, 1996). Collectively, these findings suggest that learners’ prior knowledge critically determines their ability to learn and understand new information. Metacognition refers to the ability to think about, understand and manage one’s learning (Schraw & Dennison, 1994). In essence, metacognition is the capacity to monitor comprehension, and the initiative to correct misunderstanding. Recent research has revealed the significance of metacognitive awareness in learning. For instance, learners who score high on measures of metacognition are more strategic (Garner & Alexander, 1989), more likely to use problem-solving heuristics (Artzt & Armour-Thomas, 1992), better at predicting their test scores (Vadhan & Stander, 1994), and generally outperform learners who score low on metacognitive measures (Pressley & Ghatala, 1990). More importantly, research has demonstrated the value of metacognition in predicting academic achievement. For example, greater metacognitive ability has been linked to grade point average (Everson & Tobias, 1998), math achievement (Maqsud, 1997), and reading skill (van Kraayenoord & Schneider, 1999). Moreover, McNamara and Scott (1999) demonstrated that providing metacognitive reading strategy training improved comprehension and course scores in college-level science courses. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the influence of science knowledge, reading skill, and metacognitive reading strategies on high school students’ achievement in science. While the individual effects of these factors on learning have been examined in separate studies, to the best of our knowledge, no single study has simultaneously measured the influence of all three variables