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.

Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis? 3 CER Examples based on FUN Science! CER is an awesome format to teach science students, but CER examples are lacking. CER stands for Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning. It is a great format for writing explanations is it serves to tie together findings, data, and scientific principles. Part of the difficulty with coming up with our own CER examples from science journals is due to the articles themselves. We found an excellent source of articles to use for CER examples. Getting Articles From Ignoble (yes, that’s a word) Science Our source of research articles for CER examples comes from the list of Ig Nobel Prize winners. The complete list of Ig Nobel Prize winners is published online. 2015 Ig Nobel Prize in Entomology REFERENCE: Michael L. 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine REFERENCE: “Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?” 2016 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics Putting it all together CER examples can be both fun AND connected to real scientific research. Grab PDFs of Infographics to CER Examples by Clicking Here Related

Teaching Critical Thinking Teaching Critical Thinking Reasoning from Evidence to Claims In addition to evaluating the reliability of evidence, one must ask whether the movement from evidence to claims or sub-claims is warranted. Certain tests for reasoning are especially useful in particular fields (e.g., tests of statistical reasoning). Is enough evidence provided to warrant generalization? Another approach to evaluating reasoning involves spotting logical fallacies—errors of reasoning which occur so frequently that they have been named. Attacks on character : Arguing that someone’s ideas should be rejected because he or she has a particular trait, even though the trait isn’t relevant to the discussion. Activities and Assignments (L) Can be done in large section courses What’s the Point? Have students read or listen to an argument and list each piece of evidence they encounter on the following worksheet. What’s Enough? What’s Missing? Fallacy Scavenger Hunt