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Makale Özeti:
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Science teachers frequently select science news articles as supplementary teaching
materials; however, the literature indicates that students encounter difficulties in examining
and evaluating the news content and textual elements. This paper reports an instructional
strategy of utilizing science news articles and investigates its effectiveness in enhancing
students’ cognitive learning outcomes. In this quasi-experimental study, 118 seventh
graders from four classes in one secondary school in Taiwan took part in the Science News
Instruction (SNI). After eight weeks of instruction about Genetics and Reproduction, all
students were requested to present their written arguments to the selected science news
article. Two of the classes were prompted to link to their science content knowledge (the
CK-SNI group, n=56), whereas their counterpart peers were not instructed to link to their
science content knowledge (the SNI group, n=62). The analysis of students’ written
artifacts revealed that the CK-SNI group performed significantly better on examining the
data and claims made in the science news, producing warrants of higher quality to support
their reasoning about the relationship between data and claims, and providing better reasons
to refute the identified causal textual elements. Furthermore, the results of ANCOVA
indicate that the CK-SNI group outperformed the SNI group on the cognitive test, with the
largest improvement at Apply level (ηp
2
= .10). We conclude that prompting students to
examine news content based on the content knowledge they learned is effective in fostering
students to evaluate the science news critically, and thus make a positive impact on
students’ cognitive learning.
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