One goal of school science learning is to apprentice students into the discipline. As teachers, we engage students in the multiple ways they can leverage the discourses of science so they can understand the ways science explanations can be structured and communicated to others. The Framework for K12 Science Education also suggests that students need to be aware that they are thinking scientifically. 

All of this means that we need to provide learning opportunities that bring the literacies of science into the classroom in ways that help make this apprenticeship accessible to all students. It also means that we have to be clear with students when they are using these different literacies. One example of literacy in science is the development and use of models to represent, explore, and explain phenomena. Models are more than just drawings handed in at the end of a lesson for a grade. Modeling supports student learning by uncovering areas that need more clarity, encouraging question-asking, and motivating investigation. Modeling as a sharing practice also allows all students to see assorted, unique, and sometimes powerful representations of the same phenomenon. This sharing of initial and then developing models gives all students access to different ways of thinking. 

One example of an initial model related to a high school unit is included in Figure 1. The model documents multiple relationships and uses many representations including drawings, arrows, various scales, and even a drawn set of thermometers. In this model some relationships that would help to fully answer the question “Why are the sea levels rising?” are not included. This is an initial model and it helps students to see what they don’t yet know and imagine the investigations they would create that would provide evidence for adding those ideas. While creating this model in a group, students shared their ideas in writing and orally, grappling with what they had previously learned to explain their initial ideas. Literacy around modeling is also developed as groups of students identify the critical relationships and representations to be used collectively within the models.

Following the development of small group models, teachers are encouraged to create a class consensus model. By negotiating meaning, through whole group scientist talks, of various representations to show relationships (such as various arrows or lines, words, and system components), students engage in the powerful talk of scientists. Sometimes, students are provided lists of words or components to include in their models. However, this teacher-guided practice steals students’ opportunity for science literacy development. Rather, if we are guided by the idea that we want to position students as apprentices to the work of science, then we need to engage them in (scaffolded) opportunities to flex their developing understanding of the literacies of the field. 

Modeling is a disciplinary literacy that needs to be supported in the classroom and should grow over time. The progressions of learning suggested in the Framework clearly indicate that modeling doesn’t wait until high school. Kindergartners can model pushes and pulls and over time these models become more sophisticated until physics students include vector diagrams and equations as part of their modeling to explain. The phenomenon might not even change – perhaps physics students are still modeling pushes and pulls, but the level of sophistication of students’ mental models and drawn models will grow. 

As a literacy, modeling needs to be about representations of relationships. Students’ models are not static but made dynamic by showing others how they see the relationships in the world and then capturing those relationships visually. In any unit of study and with any phenomenon, initial models are likely to lack some of these powerful relationships. This inability to model how the world works highlights potential student questions and investigations to be conducted. Knowledge developed through the investigations is then used to update and perhaps defend the next iteration of the model. The model in Figure 1 will change as students learn more, add more relationships, and increase their mechanistic understanding of why sea levels are rising. Because this is high school, students will also answer the question at different scales, using their developing understanding of changes at the molecular level. 

Modeling is only one of eight Science and Engineering Practices identified in the Framework for K12 Science Education and used in the NGSS. It has become a beneficial part of science learning and science disciplinary literacy. In addition to seven additional Practices, the Crosscutting Concepts offer a lens into disciplinary literacy in science. We should continue to investigate how these literacies of science can support students as they grow in their ability and interest to explain the world like scientists. 

National Research Council. 2012. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165.