Welcome back to Ready, Set, Science! You are listening to episode 11 and this episode will be focusing on part 4 of the book Ambitious Science Teaching. This final set of practices will help students construct a final, evidence-based explanatory model for an anchoring event. This is where you can really “test” how much your students have learned about the science concepts.
The goals of this practice are:
Engage all students in authentic disciplinary discourse around using evidence to support explanations.
Hold students accountable for using multiple sources of information to construct final explanatory models for the anchoring event (this accountability of course must be supported by scaffolding and guidance from you).
Support students in using evidence to support different aspects of their explanatory models.
This part of the unit will occur about 1-2 days before the end of the unit. It might be before a formal summative assessment or this summary could be used as a formative assessment. It really depends on how your units are structured and how often you give summative assessments.
In this practice the teacher asks students to be prepared to defend one key aspect of their original model by using relevant evidence from the classroom activities. Often, teachers use something such as a summary table to organize the relevant information for the students. You can see an example of a summary table on my website.
If you have heard of CER or currently use CER, this part of AST is going to sound very familiar to you.
The first step of this process is for students to develop a “claim”. This is a statement about the phenomena that they believe to be true. It is a very simple statement and I usually have my students put their claim into 1 sentence.
It is a great process to have students compare their claims in small groups or in front of the class. Having students share their claims allows them to get feedback on their claims and it allows them to see what other students think.
In the second step, you ask students to support their claims with evidence from the activities completed in class. They do this by reforming their models and writing a detailed explanation of their model. This is the E and R in CER. Students are presenting their evidence for their claim and reasoning with the evidence.
There are many ways to scaffold this process for students and modify it for students who may have difficulty writing a detailed explanation of their model.
When this process is followed, the students thinking is once again made visual and teachers are getting a visual representation of what students understand about the phenomenon.
You have three good options at the end of the this practice
re-teach important ideas
have students apply their models to a related phenomenon
conduct a more formal assessment of students’ understandings
Well that is all for this episode and for part 4 of AST. Remember that you can find all of the resources that I mentioned in the show notes and on my website. If you are working through the process of AST, head over to instagram and let me know how it is going. These processes are hard but worth it and I am here to help you in any way that I can. See you next time!
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