Reading Techniques Help Students Master Science

Francie, Diep. “Reading Techniques Help Students Master Science.” Scientificamerican.com. Scientific American, 11 Jun 2014. Web. 21 Sep 2014. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-techniques-help-students-master-science/ The article “Reading Techniques Help Students Master Science.” wrote by Diep, is an information text about the relationship between the reading techniques and understanding science. Diep argues that good reading skills really have a positive influence on the students’ abilities of learning science. He took Black’s an educational experience as an example to explain the reason that some students got puzzled in her classes or cannot get a good grade was that they did not know how to read the textbooks. For their lack of reading techniques, they had a problem in grasping the crux and understanding the organization of an article. Also, he cited a study research of 1651 high school students to prove that the reading abilities are the same as or more important than the basic science knowledge. So it is much important to improve the students’ reading skills when they are learning science text. According to Gomez, a psychologist of UC, reading techniques have more benefits over students in science than other discipline. Furthermore, a research group in Purdue University did a survey about the Diep’s theory. They divided 80 college students into several groups and each group was given a different reading strategy for reading texts about sea otters. After observing all the students’ reaction on recalling what they read about sea otters a week ago, they found that the students with a reading strategy of read-and-type circle performed better than others（Para.6）. So they concluded that different reading techniques do have a different influence on students. And Gomez listed three most useful reading strategies, annotation, T-charting, and summarization (Para.8). Later they applied these three strategies to a study over 860 students, they