Steroid Side-Effects
This week my partner and I decided to choose a biology topic again. Rebecca sent me an article to the link about side-effects that happen after short-term use of steroids. She found it on ScienceDaily, which is a website similar to the ones recommended by Text Savvy (Guilford, 2017). I thought the topic of the article was interesting and accessible to a high school student, so we decided to use it.
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| https://www.healthtap.com/ |
As I began to read the article (Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan, 2017), I found it personable because prednisone was mentioned, which is a medication I have taken several times in the past for allergic reactions to poison ivy. Sure enough, as I kept reading and I saw that allergies was listed as one of the main reasons people get prescribed steroids. As I finished the article, however, I was disappointed by the lack of data and supporting research; some of the things the author stated did not necessarily correlate with taking steroids. For example, the article states that people most likely to use steroids are people that are older white woman. Since it’s already known that older people are more likely to have weaker bones and experience fractures, the side-effects that are supposedly due to steroid-use could actually be because of patient demographics.
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| http://nursingcrib.com/ |
The text is an article written by Michigan Medicine of University of Michigan, which may cause bias because they may want to support their research (MMUM, 2017). The writing is straightforward and scientific; there is no use of figurative or idiomatic language. The genre is scientific research. The purpose of the text is to inform the public that they should be cautious about taking short-term use steroids and advising doctors to refrain from prescribing them or to prescribe them in the lowest dose possible. I believe it's written for the general public because the concepts and vocabulary are not very complex; other than the use of medicinal words such as corticosteroids, prednisone, and sepsis, the vocabulary were fairly simple to understand.
There was only one level of understanding for this text: the understanding that short-term use of steroids has dangerous side-effects. To understand this article, students should have a background knowledge of what steroid types of medicines are, why they are used, and that steroids act as a hormone. Some key areas in the text I found was one that highlighted that older white woman that have multiple health conditions are the most likely to use steroids. This could be used as unsupportive evidence for the issue. Another key concept is the statistics of people getting into hospitals with or without recent steroid-use; this could be used as supporting or non consequential evidence, depending on how the reader interprets it. The final key concept is the idea that steroid medications mimic hormones and can induce changes in patients.
The two strategies we used to decipher the text was narrative pyramid and discussion web. The narrative pyramid helps readers get the main points out of a text (McLaughlin, 2015). On each layer, there is a topic that they should write about and a limit of how many words they can use. On the top, I would ask students to write the topic and put the word limit for 1 (so they could write "steroids"). In the next row, the topic would be two words describing the main idea (ex. dangerous side-effects). Then the rows would go down in that fashion. The second reading strategy, the discussion web, allows students to compare two sides of an issue and decide which one they agree with (McLaughlin, 2015). For this prompt, I would ask "Does short-term use of steroids lead to serious side-effects?" The students will then organize the evidence in the 'no' and 'yes' areas. After weighing both sides, students will come to a conclusion and explain their reasoning.
After using both of these reading strategies, I found the discussion web to be more applicable to this particular article. This article was fairly easy to understand, so it was redundant to pull out main ideas with a narrative pyramid. Using the discussion web, on the other hand, allowed me analyze the validity of the author’s claims. This type of critical thinking activity would tie more closely with the standards that Rebecca and I are focusing on for this particular assignment.
References
Guilford, J., Bustamante, A., Mackura, K., Hirsch, S., Lyon, E., & Estrada, K. (2017). Text Savvy. The Science Teacher, 84 (1), 49-56. Retrieved from https://blackboard.stevenson.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-1349981-dt-content-rid-7100950_1/courses/17S8W2_ED_620_OL1/ED%20620_Science%20Journal.pdf
Maryland State Department of Education. (2012). Maryland state STEM standards of practice. Retrieved from http://mdk12.msde.maryland.gov/instruction/clg/biology/goal3.html
Maryland State Department of Education. (2012). Reading Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects - Grades 9-12. Retrieved from https://blackboard.stevenson.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-1349975-dt-content-rid-5225317_1/courses/15S8W2_ED_620_OL1/CCSC_Science_gr9-12r.pdf
McLaughlin, M. (2015). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness. Boston, MA: Pearson.
Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan. (2017, April 13). Common drugs, uncommon risks? Higher rate of serious problems after short-term steroid use: Broken bones, dangerous clots and sepsis all higher -- though still rare -- in those who were prescribed oral prednisone or other corticosteroids for 30 days or less. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 21, 2017 from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170413095037.htm
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI really like the Science Daily website because it does indeed take scientific articles and reduces their complexity. However, you have just pointed out what can be a fairly serious issue with this, what if the author (as you know these are often press releases from the sponsoring universities) doing the summarizing leaves out important information leaving the reader to think the study is inadequate? That is indeed the case here. If you follow the link to the actual study (Short term use of corticosteroids and related harms among adults in the united states:population based cohort study) that the article references, the examiners do indeed have proper control groups of patients that had not taken steroids, that fit the same demographics, and they studied to see which group had a higher incidence of described events (steroid users did) As you point out though, you would not have known this from reading this summary.
Which brings me to your choice of making this an activity in which your students form an opinion about validity. I think it is a great idea. Depending on your level of readers, you could pull up the article that Science Daily is summarizing, and put the two side by side, and ask your students if they think the summary adequately expresses the original authors intent/purpose. Science Daily, and other sites like it, are great web sites, I use them often, they can make complex material within reach of our students, but as you point out, we need to remember to take a look the original source, as well.
Great points here Julie!
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