Literacy and numeracy

Stile integrates literacy opportunities throughout all lessons. Comprehension activities – including creative writing and persuasive writing tasks – are integrated to challenge students to make connections while improving their literacy. For example, students are introduced to the nervous system through the context of dogs sniffing out cancer, and a written task challenges students to place the science in context. Explicit science news stories provide relevant and up-to-date lessons that challenge students to enhance literacy.

There are also a number of ways we support literacy development. All units come with a glossary that contains visual support for each of the key terms from the unit. As students’ scientific vocabularies grow, they are tested with different question types, such as definition matching tasks and Cloze questions, to ensure they have understood the key terms before moving to more complex questioning. Additionally, all of the text and questions in Stile can be read to students through the audio narration tool to allow for differentiation.

Student literacy is further supported by our homework and revision app Stile Quiz. Designed with multiple exposures and spaced repetition algorithms, Stile Quiz is another way that students can master the core scientific vocabulary for any of our Stile units.

Stile promotes numeracy through both explicit and integrated opportunities. Explicit skill builder lessons teach numeracy skills such as calculating measures of central tendency. Stile lessons also regularly integrate numeracy skills. For example, students are taught how to calculate ratios when learning about the layers of the Earth and use this mathematical knowledge to create a scale model. Students are frequently asked to extract meaning from graphical representations of real-world data and are also often challenged to use arithmetic through our in-app tools that promote numeracy and scientific literacy.