When Science Literacy and Reading Literacy Meet: Experimental Study of Science News Reading Strategy for High School Students

This study proposed a scaffold of a science news questioning model for high school students when they read science news. It is hoped a clear framework and clues for news reading can be facilitated by the self-questioning strategy to judge the purpose, experiment designing, and logical relations between results and evidence. Seventy students (experimental group: 32 and control group: 38) from a senior high school located in Central Taiwan participated in this study. A learning sheet of science news questioning and a comprehension test for science news were developed. The study duration was two months. The analysis of covariance results indicated that the students in the experimental group exhibited steady literacy performance improvement in three tests. Moreover, this self-questioning teaching model is helpful for their scientific literacy performances (i.e., for scientifically explaining the phenomenon and scientifically interpreting data and evidence collected) and reading literacy performances (i.e., accessing, retrieving, integrating, interpreting, reflecting on, and evaluating information). However, this model was not very helpful for designing scientific inquiries.