DARTs in science
DARTs are directed activities related to text – and kids love them.
That's because they get actively involved with a piece of writing, instead of more or less passively trying to absorb and understand it. The kids ask questions of a text. They play around with it. They get to know how it works and what it’s all about.
In the process their understanding grows and so does their feeling of familiarity and sense of ease, with both the writing and its subject matter.
So what has all this to do with science? Not much at the moment, because although DARTs are being used to excellent effect in language and social studies classes, very few science teachers are yet using DARTs in their lessons.
But science teachers are being asked to reach out to youngsters who are disaffected and uninspired by the subject. And DARTs are one way of doing so.
At least they are if one other quality that school science lacks, in too many youngsters’ eyes, is added – topicality and relevance. OK make that two other qualities.
This is why DARTs are at the heart of the activities at www.realscience.org.uk
A particularly instructive kind of DART is the analysis of statement types – Activity 4. This explores the actual science in a story, and is often very revealing.
Take a look for instance at the story posted on 18 Jan 2007, which is at http://www.realscience.org.uk/sea3.doc (for UK readers) and http://www.realscience.org.uk/seaus3.doc (US). It’s all about what makes the seaside smell like the seaside.
Like the other stories that appear in realscience, this was written originally by a press officer.
We usually then have to do a fair bit of work to make a story readable to schoolkids. But this particular piece needed very little done to it. It already scored high on readability. It also achieved the most important aim of any press release: It jumped out from the dozens of stories that flit through a journalist’s inbox every day.
But the Activity 4 analysis shows that the majority of statements in the story are about existing, accepted knowledge, and not about the new research at all. The writer of the press release is good at her job, but she is clearly not a scientist. Very few press officers, or indeed journalists, are.
That’s one reason it’s so difficult to learn science from the newspapers.
That's because they get actively involved with a piece of writing, instead of more or less passively trying to absorb and understand it. The kids ask questions of a text. They play around with it. They get to know how it works and what it’s all about.
In the process their understanding grows and so does their feeling of familiarity and sense of ease, with both the writing and its subject matter.
So what has all this to do with science? Not much at the moment, because although DARTs are being used to excellent effect in language and social studies classes, very few science teachers are yet using DARTs in their lessons.
But science teachers are being asked to reach out to youngsters who are disaffected and uninspired by the subject. And DARTs are one way of doing so.
At least they are if one other quality that school science lacks, in too many youngsters’ eyes, is added – topicality and relevance. OK make that two other qualities.
This is why DARTs are at the heart of the activities at www.realscience.org.uk
A particularly instructive kind of DART is the analysis of statement types – Activity 4. This explores the actual science in a story, and is often very revealing.
Take a look for instance at the story posted on 18 Jan 2007, which is at http://www.realscience.org.uk/sea3.doc (for UK readers) and http://www.realscience.org.uk/seaus3.doc (US). It’s all about what makes the seaside smell like the seaside.
Like the other stories that appear in realscience, this was written originally by a press officer.
We usually then have to do a fair bit of work to make a story readable to schoolkids. But this particular piece needed very little done to it. It already scored high on readability. It also achieved the most important aim of any press release: It jumped out from the dozens of stories that flit through a journalist’s inbox every day.
But the Activity 4 analysis shows that the majority of statements in the story are about existing, accepted knowledge, and not about the new research at all. The writer of the press release is good at her job, but she is clearly not a scientist. Very few press officers, or indeed journalists, are.
That’s one reason it’s so difficult to learn science from the newspapers.
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