The problem-solving processes of writers and readers. Occasional Paper No.7

While young children\u27s problem-solving models are not as elaborate as those of older students, they share an important belief, namely, that writing and reading are fundamentally purposeful acts of communication. Focusing on the interpretation of process, in particular on writing and reading as forms of problem-solving that are shaped by communicative purpose, three sets of vignettes show students at different stages of schooling as they write and read. The first set illustrates the nature of problem-solving in skilled reading and writing processes that are held as goals for college students. The second set of vignettes places these processes in context by considering some of the factors that influence students\u27 problem-solving as they write and read in response to typical class assignments. The third section explores the problem-solving skills that young students--children learning to write and read and adolescents expanding their writing and reading abilities--bring to their school assignments. It is critical that strategies such as summarization and self-questioning not become disconnected from the larger communicative, meaning-construction process. The critical question is how to sustain and further develop the potential evident in the problem-solving of young writers and readers. Flexibly structured opportunities for teachers and students to exchange views about both their own and professional texts provide the student with context for cultivating a deeper understanding of writing and reading as purposeful acts of communication and to transform the contexts in which writing and reading occur

Appropriating Scienticfic Discourse: Findings from Language Minority Classrooms

This paper reports a study of the effects of a collaborative inquiry approach to science on language minority students' (middle and high school) learning. This approach emphasizes involiving the students, most of whom have never studied science before and some of whom have had very little schooling of any kind, in "doing science" in ways that practicing scientist do. This study addresses the question: To what extent do students appropriate scientific ways of knowing and reasoning as a result of their participation in collaborative scientific inquiry? We focus our analysis on changes in students, conceptual knowledge and use of hypotheses, experiments, and explanations to organize their reasoning in the context of two think-aloud problems. The findings indicate that at the beginning of the school year the students' reasoning was non-analytic and bound to personal experience. By contrast, at the end of the school year they reasoned in terms of larger explanatory system, used hypothese to organize and give direction to their reasoing, and ddemonstrated and awareness of the function of experimentation in producing evidence to evaluate hypotheses

Collaboration through writing and reading: Exploring possibilities

Betsy Bowen (with A. Rosebery, L. Flower, B. Warren, B. Bruce, M. Kantz & Ann Penrose ) is a contributing author, The problem-solving processes of readers and writers: Similarities and differences , pp. 136-163