Impact of Literacy on Student Readiness in Math and Science Classroom

Lack of literacy, specifically disciplinary literacy, is an epidemic in education today. Here, I will illustrate how this problem presents itself in our student’s reading every day in every class. Within a literature review, many accounts are detailed about the impact literacy has on a student’s educational career. From the outset, literacy is a key factor in a student’s success in school. A research study was conducted that asked students to give varied definitions of the word ‘volume’ based on prior experience. These results showed that direct instruction in how a word can change based on its context had an immediate effect on student understanding and mastery of a topic. Prior to instruction, students had little to know knowledge about how reading can occur in the math and science classroom. After instruction students could give many examples of how reading is used in the classroom and how words can have different meanings in different contexts.