Lopez - Pressing for Evidence - W6

In Pressing for Evidence-Based Explanations, Ambitious Science Teaching summarizes the steps and importance of closing out a unit with students capable of providing explanations for the phenomenon and anchoring event with evidence for their causal models. It also provides ideas for scaffolding to help all students learn the skill and be capable of providing at least one defense of a single aspect of their explanatory model, and eventually be able to put together multiple claims to give evidence-based reasoning for the entire phenomenon.

Helping Students Work with Evidence is a guide for teachers to first and foremost, understand what counts as evidence, claims, or explanations so they can help support students in forming them. It also defines what a teacher can consider as counting in the scientific community as a claim and explanation, and the difference between data and evidence.

I found these articles to be most helpful in giving straightforward structures and scaffolds for teachers to support student's claims and explanations of their models and evidence and push them further in making connections between activities that have been completed as part of the unit and using them to create claims that pass muster in the scientific community. I liked the scaffolding questions that they suggested and reading about some of the challenges that students will most likely face when learning how to use evidence to explain their causal evidence. I know that my students are familiar with using evidence to support their answers, but I think that this article helps to define the difference between everyday explanations and scientific explanations. Also, as a non-scientist, I really appreciated that the second reading helped support teachers in understanding how to define claims and evidence and breaking down the different ways teachers can help students get there through different types of phenomenon. I think this will be very helpful for me in facilitating discussion and scaffolding and back pocket questions.