How Science Instruction Improves Literacy by Building Background Knowledge

Summary

In this article, you will learn how:

• Science instruction builds the background knowledge, vocabulary, and language comprehension skills students need to understand increasingly complex texts.
• Inquiry-based science creates shared learning experiences that strengthen literacy for all students while promoting educational equity.
• Protecting elementary science instruction is an investment in stronger readers, stronger thinkers, and long-term student success.

Why Reading Comprehension Requires More Than Phonics

For years, elementary schools have invested significant time and resources in helping students become proficient readers. Guided by the Science of Reading, districts have strengthened foundational literacy instruction through evidence-based practices that develop students’ phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

These efforts have helped more students learn how to read. Yet many educators continue to encounter a familiar challenge: students who can accurately decode words yet still struggle with reading comprehension, especially with complex texts.

The missing piece is often not reading ability itself — it is language comprehension.

Reading comprehension depends on far more than recognizing words on a page. Students also need the background knowledge, vocabulary, verbal reasoning, and other key skills that allow them to make sense of what they are reading. Together, these skills form the upper portion of Scarborough's Reading Rope known as language comprehension.

Without this essential skill set, even fluent readers can struggle to understand a text's meaning.

At the same time, one of the very subjects best equipped to build these skills has steadily lost instructional time: science. As primary schools devote larger blocks of the day to literacy instruction, science is frequently compressed into a brief lesson, or eliminated altogether, in many elementary classrooms.

But what if science isn't competing with literacy instruction? What if instead it is one of literacy's greatest learning allies?

Research increasingly suggests that inquiry-based science plays a critical role in strengthening language comprehension. Through hands-on investigations, classroom discussion, and meaningful exploration of real-world phenomena, science helps students build the shared experiences that make reading comprehension possible.

For school and district leaders, the implication is clear: investing in elementary science instruction isn't simply about improving science achievement. It is also a strategic investment in literacy.

How Inquiry-Based Science Supports Reading Comprehension

Inquiry-based science doesn't just teach students scientific concepts — it creates the shared experiences and skills that make reading comprehension possible.

Rather than asking students to read about unfamiliar ideas through informational texts, inquiry-based science begins with observation, investigation, and discovery. Students explore real-world phenomena, ask questions, gather evidence, test ideas, and discuss what they discover before they encounter related reading.

Those experiences become the foundation for comprehension. Imagine an elementary classroom where students investigate how matter changes, observe patterns in weather, and explore how ecosystems change throughout the seasons. Long before students read an informational article about these concepts, they have already developed mental models that help them understand the vocabulary and ideas they will encounter in the article.

Inquiry-Based Science Builds Vocabulary and Background Knowledge 

When students have firsthand experience investigating a scientific phenomenon, informational texts become opportunities to deepen understanding rather than introduce entirely unfamiliar concepts. Reading shifts from memorizing disconnected facts to synthesizing new information with background knowledge students have already begun to build.

For example, consider two students who are reading about cave paintings. One student has never visited a cave or any other underground structure; their only knowledge of caves is what they have seen on television. The other student has also never visited a real cave, but has learned about cave formation as part of their science lesson — and even started to grow crystals on a piece of yarn strung between two glasses of salt water.

Which student would be better equipped to understand the vocabulary they may encounter in the article, such as stalagmite, crystal, cavern, and grotto? Which student would be more intrigued by a photograph of a large stalactite, and have a better understanding of how long it might have taken to form? Which student might be able to more richly imagine what it was like for ancient peoples to live inside of a cave?

By helping students connect texts with their own lived experiences, inquiry-based, hands-on science can add more and deeper dimensions to students’ reading experiences.

Inquiry-Based Science Develops Language Skills

Inquiry-based science naturally develops many of the same language skills that support reading comprehension.

As students explain their observations, compare evidence, defend claims, and communicate their thinking, they strengthen their verbal reasoning, academic vocabulary, oral language, and critical-thinking skills — all essential components of language comprehension identified in Scarborough's Reading Rope.

For example, consider a scenario where students get to create rainbows with prisms and are then tasked with forming a theory on how they work. During this activity, they will use descriptive language to communicate their observations to their peers, use their critical-thinking skills to develop a theory of how the prism splits light into rainbows, and cite specific evidence to support their argument when they theorize the science at work in prisms — all of these actions help develop robust language skills that ultimately lead to better reading and writing skills across the entire curriculum.

How Science Creates More Equitable Learning Opportunities

Perhaps the greatest strength of inquiry-based science is that it creates shared experiences for all students.

Students do not enter school with the same life experiences. Some have visited museums, explored nature, traveled extensively, attended summer camps, or had opportunities to engage in rich conversations about science and the world around them. Others may have had far fewer opportunities to build the background knowledge that later supports reading comprehension.

Instead of relying on background knowledge gained through these individual experiences, inquiry-based science allows all students to observe the same phenomenon, conduct the same investigation, and participate in the same academic discussions.

When that happens — when students investigate the same phenomenon together, conduct the same experiment, or analyze the same evidence — they develop a common foundation of knowledge. Reliance on disparate and disconnected experiences outside of school is replaced by an intentional, equitable model where every student has the same opportunity to build background knowledge through rich, hands-on learning.

Those experiences become shared background knowledge that supports reading, writing, discussion, and learning across all subject areas.