CER stands for: Claim-Evidence-Reasoning: It is ultimately a writing strategy used in Science Education to help students make connections with concepts. We try to do this in Math Education as well!
Have you ever had students respond, “I don’t know. It just did,” when asked to analyze and interpret something in class? We all want our students to “think like a mathematician or scientist,” but often they fall short in connecting the dots between the what we do in class/lab and the math/science concepts. Claim-Evidence-Reasoning or CER is a writing strategy that can develop a student’s analytical thinking and argumentative writing skills to turn that “I don’t know” into “aha, so that’s why we got those results.”
This is a great tool for students, however, we now are in a world where for some folks, claim-evidence-reasoning does not compare to personal opinion when it comes to many of our daily struggles. I wonder if CER falls apart when we are faced with irrationality?
Here is what I want you to do.
- A couple of sentences on your thoughts about where CER connects to our world.
- Think of a recent task that you gave to students that involved them having to reason an answer. How did you have them explore (a) making a claim, (b) giving some evidence and then (c) explaining their reasoning.
- Give a brief description of the task. (or add a picture/link to it)
- Write about how it went.
- What were the pros and cons of the activity?
- How did you know what students learned?
- Anything else you want to reflect on.
- Use tag challenge-4