Linguists have discovered that the verbs "define", "explain", "hypothesize", "infer" and "interpret" are absent in science texts designed for the junior high school years. These are metacognitive verbs that imply active mental construction. The statements in these science texts give little indication that science is the product of human talk and thought. This project will conduct an experiment to determine the impact of a simple intervention in which two groups of teachers prepare lesson plans for a semester. One group will design the lessons around the use of the metacognitive verbs, while the control group will use an alternate set of verbs commonly found in science textbooks, such as find, prove, tell, show, demonstrate. Teachers' style of teaching in the classroom will be observed and analyzed. Students will be tested on content mastery at both a factual and a deep conceptual level. The differences between the experimental and control classes will be analyzed, taking into account a variety of other teacher variables such as supervisor's claims of teacher effectiveness. Implications will be drawn regarding modification of teacher behavior through this rather simple device of emphasizing a few key words.
