In the age of social media and alternative facts, claim-evidence reasoning is becoming more infrequent and increasingly important in our daily lives. People have a platform to post claims with no evidence and unsupported reasoning. As teachers, it is a critical challenge that we engage students in CER so that they can become not only effective scientists, but also responsible and informed members of society.
Each week, my CT and I use a guided inquiry model for students to engage in virtual experiments. As students work through these experiments, they make observations and wonderings. At the end of the class, we have a PearDeck slide where students write a paragraph about a specific physics question, citing data from the experiments. In this activity, the claim is the response to the prompted question, the evidence comes from the experiments, and the reasoning is how the data connects to key physics concepts.
The benefits of this activity is that it gives students an opportunity to think about abstract physics ideas in concrete terms, and gives them practice in identifying patterns in data and connecting those patterns to broader conclusions. The main downside with this activity is that it leaves less room for exploration, as the experiments are virtual and students don't have an opportunity to play around with different components to see how they work. Instead, we play a video and have them make observations and wonderings.
To determine to what extent students learned, we review all of the PearDeck responses and provide written feedback rather than a grade. Students then assign themselves a grade based on our feedback, which allows them to engage in metacognition in assessing how much they learned in a given lesson.