Both of the articles were concerned with eliciting evidence based explanations from students.
These articles stress the importance of pressing for evidence-based explanations and helping students talk about evidence. Both of these themes were influential in my thinking this week.
The article about pressing for evidence gives several helpful examples on how to do this, by either asking for an activity or the reasoning. While it is simple, it gets the students to do the thinking rather than the teacher doing the thinking for them. Other questions can be as simple as “How do you know?” or “What else?” It also touches on the importance of modeling and writing gapless explanations. These are both activities we have touched on in class, which we know are very important to forming understandings. It is important that students are able to make sense of the information in their own way in order to transfer it to a working understanding of a topic. We also need to focus on differentiating the difference between a claim and an explanation. A claim simply states what a student believes to be true, while an explanation also gives evidence as to why the student thinks that. In creating an explanation, our students need to be able to not just say that the claim is supported by the data, but be able to explain why it is an explanation. The article also provides some sentence stems for the students who may have trouble beginning them on their own.
These practices are some that we need to be practicing constantly. Our students will struggle without constant reinforcement. As I begin to plan for next year, I will think about implementing plenty of opportunities to students to create evidence based explanations based on data.
I also agree that it is super important for us to constantly reinforce this and provide students with the support they need. I think one of the biggest things I have learned from this class is that often times I leave expert gaps for my students. Often I'll throw them into something and then get frustrated when they don't understand or don't produce the product I'm asking them to produce. I have learned just how important sentence frames, scaffolding, and constant support are when you're trying to get kids to really think scientifically and you're asking them to provide explanations.
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