Designing Science Inquiry: Claim + Evidence + Reasoning = Explanation

In an interview with students, MIT's Kerry Emmanuel stated, "At the end of the day, it's just raw curiosity. I think almost everybody that gets seriously into science is driven by curiosity." Curiosity -- the desire to explain how the world works -- drives the questions we ask and the investigations we conduct. Let's say that we are planning a unit on matter. Is air matter? Next, we can ask our students what data they need to answer the question, and how they can collect that data -- how they can investigate. According to the CER model, an explanation consists of: A claim that answers the question Evidence from students' data Reasoning that involves a "rule" or scientific principle that describes why the evidence supports the claim Your students might suggest the following explanation: Air is matter (claim). The explanation could be made more complete by including evidence and reasoning related to air taking up space. Introducing CER to your Students Let the Inquiry Begin

Scientific Writing Scaffolds As a department we've been working on different writing scaffolds. We use Constructing Meaning as a school which I think is mostly good. We've tried all kinds of different writing frames with varying degrees of success. Most of these come from Constructing Meaning. This was one of our first attempts. It was our sixth graders' first or second try at extended science writing. We pulled two main lessons from this. 1. 2. Next attempts: This is just the first page but the back is similar. Below is an even more generalized example. We go back and forth about word banks. Most recently we gave all of our sixth graders a prompt from the textbook about whether or not the government should provide flood insurance. On my end, all they got was a graphic organizer. I put the claim at the bottom because I wanted them to go through each argument first before deciding on a claim. Their claims I limited to "The government should/should not provide flood insurance." I was very happy with the results here.

Claim Evidence Reasoning By far, the biggest shift in my teaching from year 1 to year 7 has been how much emphasis I now place on evaluating evidence and making evidence-based claims. I blame inquiry. Not inquiry in the generalized, overloaded, science teaching approach sense. Just the word. "Inquiry." Even now, when I hear the word "inquiry" I still think mainly of asking questions and designing experiments. We were very busy and very engaged and learned very little. There are a few structures I've been using to help shift the focus on the class to analysis and argument. Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (pdf and pdf) is a framework for writing scientific explanations. As part of their lab handout they get a prompt that looks like this: As the year goes on I remove most of the scaffolds until ultimately the students just get a prompt or question. I've been happy with it. I like frameworks a lot. The key to implementation is that the structure of the class really has to be designed around C-E-R.

Explanations: C.E.R. Prezi