Handouts are available below

Big Idea

Today, I want to share the 3 things I’m doing to teach CER (Claim Evidence Reasoning) this year. 

Long story short, the 3 things that are working for me in teaching CER is scaffolding using prompts and sentence starters, applying these prompts through everyday, informal examples, and practicing using short and simple investigation questions.

My 3 Parts to Teaching CER in 2022

When scaffolding CER for students, I use the following 3 prompts: (1) for claims, I tell students to give me the simple answer to the research question of the lab; (2) for evidence, I tell students to start by using “according to my data” and then to summarize the important data that supports their answer and to include measurements and numbers; and, (3) for reasoning, I tell students that anything that requires the word “because” falls under reasoning.

I write down these prompts everywhere when students first learn to use the CER framework: in labs, on test questions, and even on the board during class discussion questions. I don’t think you can scaffold this enough. Yes, student work may feel formulaic at first. But, students need structure when learning a new way of doing something – just like the 5 paragraph essay provides structure in essay writing in English. 

We take these prompts and use them to analyze and work through CER examples. For example, I ask students, “which part of the body is the most painful to get stung by a bee?” and then tell them about the scientist who performed an experiment to answer that question. This scientist’s claim is that the nostrils and upper lip are the most painful places to get stung by a bee and, according to his data, pain scale results for both regions always ranked highest. For reasoning, this scientist suggested that because lips and nostrils have more nerve endings due to the fact that these areas are openings to the body, this also makes bee stings more painful in these areas. This year, I also used this worksheet, which gets students to underline, circle, and bracket out the claim, evidence and reasoning for 3 CER statements. Each statement is an argument for who the most successful movie director is. One statement claims Spielberg is the most successful, another says James Cameron, while another claims the Russo brothers. Refer to the video to see a completed version (in highlighter).

Finally, I have students write CER statements through simple lab activities that have very clear investigation questions and that provide data that is straightforward to analyze. I performed the beaker lab I mentioned in my previous episode, which has students determine whether beakers of the same size have the same mass. I’ve also had students use a hot plate, a beaker of water, and a thermometer to determine whether doubling the power setting on the hot plate will double how quickly the water heats up. Students can easily record and analyze data and provide a logical explanation for the results to this question. This year, I also had students do a volume lab to practice CER too, but I’ll talk about that in a future episode.

That’s how I’m doing it this year and it’s still a work in progress. How do you do it? Please email me a strategy or two – I’m interested to know. 

Thanks for reading, and we’ll talk science again soon.

Resources

Handout(s): CER Starter Kit MS Edition

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