A 20 page research paper that offers a discussion and analysis of research findings, as well as suggestions to a student concerning how to prepare a proposal for a planned intervention study that will address the professional development needs of a group of first grade teachers on how to integrate reading and science instruction. Bibliography lists 15 sources.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_khlitsc.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
professional development needs of a group of first grade teachers on how to integrate reading and science instruction. Chapter 1 Context/Background Undoubtedly, one of the principal reasons why the
student researching this topic would wish to link literacy strategies to science instruction is due to the urgent need to increase the level of literacy in the early grades. According
to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 40 percent of all American students in the fourth grade read below their grade level (Martin, Martin and Carvalho, 2008). As reading is
the fundamental skill upon which all other academic learning depends, this statistic is highly predictive of these students continuing to have extremely academic difficulty. The answer to the problem
is not clear, and this observation is primarily due to the fact that educators do not agree on the optimal approach as to how children should be taught to read.
In fact, issues regarding reading pedagogy have constituted a longstanding and heated debate among educators. It has been the pattern for decades that popular theories of instruction, complete with
detailed methodologies, will emerge periodically and become immensely popular within school system, only to be subsequently devoted, retire into obscurity, but remerge again in five to ten years with only
slight changes to start the process over again (Martin, Martin and Carvalho, 2008). Also, another aspect of this problem, which affects the science instruction side of this equation, is
that students who receive special education services often do not receive sufficient science instruction to be evaluated as in line with national standards (Melber and brown, 2008). Consequently, it is
not surprising that there are few scientists who were classified as special education students in their formative years, which suggests non-interest in science. Yet, research indicates that when students are