Handouts are available for download at the end of the episode.

Video Transcript

Hi Science Teachers,

Welcome to Science Teacher Summer School, Episode 6.

I’m Kent Lui, and something you may not know about me is that writing a song that makes it into the billboard top 10 is on my bucket list. I’m just not sure if it’s going to be in pop, rock, country, or hip hop yet. Or maybe grunge- that can make a comeback. Now, let’s get to work.

A few episodes ago, I talked about the most important skill I teach in my class: CER. It’s a structure students use to communicate their scientific conclusions and arguments. For more, please go to episode 2 of science teacher summer school. Although I teach it every year, I am constantly revamping how I teach it because I still find my students struggling to do it. We go over definitions and examples. But, still, it’s not enough. Some are still stuck.

So, I wondered why students were struggling and what could be done to get then unstuck?

I found inspiration in some of my daughter’s workbooks – you know, the ones you can buy at Costco that say MathSmart or Complete Curriculum. One thing those workbooks are really good at is providing good templates for tackling a problem. I especially liked the prompts and fill-in-the-blank exercises these workbooks had – these really help lead a student to a solution. So, this past year, I developed detailed prompts for each lab we did. The point was to show students one way to structure their statements. And, the prompts were definitely more detailed at the beginning of the year, when students were just learning about CER, and got more open ended during the middle and end of the year.

Consider an experiment where we’re studying how temperature affects how quickly food coloring diffuses in water. We’ve all done an experiment like this before: get a beaker of hot water, drop a drop of food coloring in it, and time how long it takes for the dye to spread. Then, do the same with a beaker of warm water, and then cold water. When it came to students writing a CER statement at the end of the lab, I provided these prompts:

For Claim, I wrote out “When water temperature increases/decreases, the rate of diffusion increases/decreases.” Students would rewrite the statement and choose the words that describe the relationship they observed.

For more advanced students, I would provide a more general prompt like “What is the relationship between water temperature and the rate of diffusion?”

For Evidence, I gave students the following statement to copy and complete: “According to my observations, in hot water, it took X seconds for the dye to diffuse; in warm water, it took Y seconds; and, in cold water, it took Z seconds.”

For Reasoning, I gave students the following prompt: “One explanation for this result is…”

Armed with those prompts, a student could write something like this:

When water temperature increases, the rate of diffusion increases.
According to my observations, in hot water, it took 8 seconds for the dye to diffuse; in warm water, it took 90s; and, in cold water, it was not able to diffuse completely.
One explanation for this result is due to kinetic molecular theory. Since warmer particles move faster than colder ones, when dye is added to hot water, the water particles will move faster and spread the dye faster.

That’s a pretty complete conclusion – one that captures the data and theory together with an experimental observation.

If you’re looking for resources for students to get started with CER, prompts, worksheets, and sample data to analyze, I have an ebook coming out soon that will have a bunch of useful stuff for you. Go to my website, realsciencechallenge.com, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates.

That’s all the time we have for this episode. Please write your questions in the comments section. Join me next time, when I’ll be talking about educational technology and the one mistake we all make when it comes to using it. You don’t want to miss it.

See you again soon. And, remember to science everywhere everyday.

Resources

Handout(s): Handout – CER Prompt Samples

Our resources are free. We aren’t collecting emails for our resources. However, it would help us out if you liked us on our Facebook page and subscribed to our Youtube Channel. Thanks!