Element 11

Desired Effect

Students draw conclusions and create inferences about the new content by providing evidence to support their conclusions and inferences.

Purpose

Once students have had an opportunity to process new knowledge, the next step is to help them elaborate on what they have learned by asking questions. Well-planned questions are a productive way to encourage students to incorporate their own thinking into the learning. Questioning techniques compel students to go beyond what was introduced by making inferences and providing evidence to support their claims.

• Helping students elaborate on new content should not occur in isolation. It exists as part of Design Question 2 (What will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?) and is primarily used as a means of allowing students to make deeper connections to new content.
• In DQ2, students are strategically grouped together introduced to chunks of new content. Students are then given opportunities to process this new content through rich discussion with peers as well as chances to explain, ask clarifying questions, and record and represent information. Teachers can help students make deeper connections to this new content by asking questions requiring students to first make inferences or draw conclusions about this information, and then provide evidence for these elaborations.
• This marks the beginning of the gradual release process in which students begin to think on deeper levels about the content and slowly move away from teacher-owned learning.
• Teachers should use elaborative questioning not only to monitor students’ thought processes, but also as a means of modeling the types of questions students should ask themselves when they are working on cognitively complex tasks (DQ4) that require them to make a claim and provide evidence to support their thinking