New Perspectives in Science Education

Promoting Reading Comprehension and Learning with Multimodal Science Text (PRISM) is an intervention designed to teach students how to comprehend science texts with added instruction for visuals. The reading comprehension system instructs students to read and connect important ideas logically using causal reasoning and comparisons. The knowledge acquisition and transformation (KAT) framework presents instruction on using four top-level structures (i.e., cause and effect, problem and solution, cause-problem-solution, and comparison) to help students generate main ideas, summaries, and inferences regarding science texts. By using these logical connections, the brain associations of the content knowledge is enhanced and well-associated. The visuals address six types of diagrams presented in scientific texts (e.g., charts, images, topographic maps). During this session, we will present the theoretical foundations of the PRISM solution and results from a recent pilot study with students in grades 6-8. Results show that students experience difficulties in learning from visuals and support is necessary for them to process the text and visuals. Additional information about the KAT Framework and PRISM with associated research is available at http://literacy.io