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February 2010 > School News
Grant Extends Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading to Middle School
UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) in association with the Graduate School of Education (GSE) has secured a three-year grant to extend the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading model to grades 6–8. The $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports piloting the program in San Francisco Bay Area middle schools before testing it nationwide.
The Seeds/Roots curriculum, which has been used effectively for grades 2–5, combines science and literacy content to help students build inquiry and fundamental literacy skills to make sense of the natural world.
“Our nation’s future depends on our ability to provide challenging and effective educational opportunities for all students, particularly in science,” says LHS Associate Director Jacqueline Barber, the co-principal investigator of the project along with GSE Dean and Professor P. David Pearson. “This builds on work we have done to create an innovative and effective approach to integrating science and literacy at the elementary level, resulting in a program called Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading. With this grant, we will extend the powerful and equitable learning and teaching of deep science content to grades 6-8, and provide middle school teachers with a program that can be implemented more widely.”Pearson says that students using the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading curriculum in their classrooms learn high-level science concepts through multiple modalities: firsthand investigations, student-to-student discussion, reading science texts, and writing — the “Do-it, Talk-it, Read-it, Write-it” model.
An explicit focus of the curriculum is on disciplinary literacy, the specialized skills involved in reading, writing and talking about science, which often present obstacles to science learning, particularly at the middle school level and above. Classroom studies have shown the Seeds/Roots approach to be a highly effective and engaging way for all students to learn science, especially academically vulnerable students, such as struggling readers and English language learners.
The Gates grant will extend the Seeds/Roots model of learning and teaching to middle school classrooms in four stages over three years:
- Conduct research and development trials in San Francisco Bay Area classrooms in order to extend the Seeds/Roots model to middle school;
- Apply this model to develop, pilot and field test nationwide one year of the Seeds/Roots program for grades 6-8;
- Develop a model of an online, digital teacher’s guide, that enables teachers to customize instructional plans for their particular contexts;
- Develop formative assessments.
The new Seeds/Roots middle school program will be produced and marketed for broad, nationwide dissemination beginning with a one-year Earth Science curriculum in early 2013. On the strength of a proven model of curriculum, the LHS/GSE team expects success in raising additional funds to enable release of a one-year Physical Science curriculum and a one-year Life Science curriculum in early 2015.
The Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading was one of 15 grants announced on February 18 by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation totaling more than $19.5 million to support the development and testing of prototype classroom assessments and instructional tools in math and literacy to help educators better prepare all students for success beyond high school. The investments are part of the foundation’s support of the effort to build a coherent system of consistent college- and career-ready standards, aligned assessments, and teaching tools to strengthen teacher effectiveness and dramatically improve student achievement.
More information on the grants is available on the Gates Foundation website as well a companion article in Education Week.
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