Allycia Uhrhan’s 6th graders at Truman Middle School in St. Louis started their field-science week collecting data on fish hatching at nearby Forest Park. But the trip really started the prior week, in English class, where teacher Kristina Kohl had students dig into history and science articles about the park to pair with Uhrhan’s ecology readings. Once the students returned, they wrote up lab reports and reflections on their field day in both classes.
This interdisciplinary approach underscores something important about communication in the sciences: Scientific progress does not take place in a vacuum. Researchers regularly discuss avenues for exploration, present and argue about their findings, and present their conclusions to the public.
But many science classes don’t fully give students the specific literacy skills needed to understand and make scientifically reasoned arguments. And science itself, as a discipline, demands the use of specific kinds of reading-related tools: understanding scientific vocabulary and language; interpreting data from text, graphics, and charts; and making (and critiquing) scientific arguments.
“The texts that students use in many science classrooms are not adequately complex,” said William Folk, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Missouri and co-director of the science-literacy project. “Textbooks will almost always present a concept as a series of facts, without anything like the complexity that actually occurs in the literature and without the process by which claims have to be justified with evidence in science.”
Uhrhan’s work is the result of Folk’s National Institutes of Health-funded project, Linking Science, Math, and Literacy for All Learners, designed to improve middle school science literacy. For the past seven years, University of Missouri researchers have worked with 50 local English/language arts, science, and special education middle school teachers to co-develop interdisciplinary lessons in science literacy.
A collaborative approach to reading science texts
Uhrhan said that she assigned relatively few writing tasks in her class before the program—partly because the materials didn’t support it and partly because, like most content-certified teachers, she didn’t get a lot of reading training.
“Our science [textbooks] had short little sentences, and we kind of avoided reading altogether,” she said, “because we, as science teachers, didn’t get that training of how to teach kids how to decode and break this stuff down. So, it kind of scared us.”
Teachers participating in the project reviewed science units throughout the year and developed lessons that could be used in science and ELA classes. Students might tackle reading and annotating journal articles and learning new vocabulary in English, while collecting data, conducting experiments, and writing up the results in science class.
In a two-week unit on vaping, for example, Kohl’s class analyzed the persuasive tactics used in e-cigarette advertisements, while Uhrhan’s class studied nicotine’s effects on the circulatory, nervous, and respiratory systems.
“With [narrative] stories, it’s a bit easier for students to understand because it’s relatable, but some of the concepts in science are above the heads of a lot of people who are reading them. So we have to break down nonfiction texts into readable segments and strategies of how to decipher what these words mean and how they relate in context,” Uhrhan said. “We’ve gotten to work together as an ELA teacher, a science teacher, and special ed. teacher to get all three perspectives of how we could break that down to kids.”
Students learn to master the text structures in science
What makes scientific reading different from narrative or informational reading in English class? While students generally learn the common structures of narratives—plot beats, character arcs, rising and falling action, for example—they often don’t learn to break down the specific structures common in scientific writing, such as identifying claims and methodology, Uhrhan said.
Students also often get confused about additional text features in science, said Katie Woepke, a special education teacher for St. Louis County who helped develop the interdisciplinary lessons at Truman. Those features include reading graphs, diagrams, and tables in the context of the larger text.
“If your brain doesn’t realize that those text features are there to help you,” Woepke said, “then they’re just more words on the page, and kids get discouraged.”
While assignments in both ELA and science expect students to advance their written arguments using claims, evidence, and reasoning, teachers learned to develop a common structure for teaching argumentation across different subjects—helping students understand, for example, the differences in the kinds of evidence that can be used.
“Each discipline has different norms for the types of argumentation and the types of evidence that can be used,” said Folk, the University of Missouri professor. “For social sciences or literature, the types of evidence will differ dramatically from what is acceptable and what is used in physical science. Nevertheless, making a claim based on evidence and reasoning in order to be able to communicate and justify the claim are shared practices between the science and English/language arts standards.”
It also meant developing scaffolds for students with disabilities and English learners. For example, teachers created flip books of key vocabulary and “scavenger hunts” for different structures within a scientific article. “These articles are in-depth, you know. But there’s no reason these students with disabilities can’t get the same information and understand it,” Woepke said.
Building science literacy can improve learning gaps
Building up literacy skills in science also could be critical to helping students succeed across subjects, according to Sue Kowalski, a senior research scientist at the assessment group NWEA, who has studied academic recovery in schools.
Nationally, learning gaps have opened for middle school students in reading, math, and science since 2019. Overall, NWEA has found larger gaps in reading and math—more than twice as large as in science, but the gaps have widened for some student groups.
For example, Hispanic middle school students performed on average five months behind their pre-pandemic scores in science in 2021; that gap grew to 11 months in 2024. Black middle school students remain 13 to 15 months behind their average science performance in 2024 on the NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, the most commonly used benchmark assessment in reading, math, and science.
“What we’re seeing is that there are important leverage points because of how science and literacy are so synergistic,” Kowalski said. “It’s not about choosing science or choosing reading. It’s about creating space in literacy education that’s not simply narrative text but explanatory, informative literacy skills that are useful in comprehending science texts.”
That’s what Jeannie Sneller, a 6th and 7th grade science teacher at South Callaway Middle School in Mokane, Mo., has begun doing. Before joining the University of Missouri program, Sneller said her students weren’t reading and writing enough in class to develop the stamina needed to tackle real scientific articles—or even in-depth questions on state science tests.
“When I first started, I taught the way I was taught: That is, let’s read some of the textbook, and we’ll write all the vocabulary down, take these notes, and then we’ll do some labs to back it up—readings, notes, labs, readings, notes, labs,” Sneller said. “But I found if it came to reading anything longer than a few sentences, they would just check out. They would only write one sentence, or not even a full sentence, and I thought, ‘Well, they can’t express to me what they’re learning in writing.’ ”
Now, Sneller’s students work their way through scientific articles on sound waves, online videos about food systems, and charts of global data on pollinators as part of a unit on honeybees.
“It’s really helped me revolutionize the way I teach,” she said. “We step away from that textbook, … and that’s made a big difference, because the kids are more engaged. They understand the content better because they’ve seen the information in so many different ways.”
