Definition: What is Content Literacy?

Learning across content areas (e.g., social studies, science) requires middle-grades students to acquire and apply reading and writing strategies to construct knowledge. Constructing knowledge, a meaning-making process, goes beyond just acquiring information.

To make meaning and build understanding, students need both general literacy skills and content-specific literacy skills. For example, in reading they need to activate prior knowledge, monitor comprehension, repair comprehension, determine important ideas, synthesize information, draw inferences, and ask questions. Depending on the types of texts they are reading (e.g., textbooks, primary sources, web-based documents, newspapers), as well as the purpose for reading (locate specific information, connect ideas, determine a point of view), they need to select and vary their reading strategies.

In content area classes, such as social studies and science, writing is an integral part of the knowledge construction process. To gather information, students take notes, make outlines, and create graphic organizers. To process or synthesize information, they write summaries of key ideas, write lab reports, and keep journals. To represent their knowledge, they produce final reports, web sites, multimedia presentations, and projects. The development and application of writing skills is a necessary component of making meaning in content areas.