Teaching students to use the CER method to generate answers to questions is hugely important. It is an important tool for them, even into adulthood. Once they have mastered it, they will then be able to use the scaffold to, in turn, develop questions. This is important in a world of ‘fake news’ and ‘pseudoscience’.
In a recent reteach of CER, I asked students to consider the claim, “Denver should ban pitbull because all pitbulls are dangerous”.
The students had to agree or disagree and support their own claim with evidence, and then construct a statement of reasoning based on the evidence they found.
Overall the students did well, however my CT and I noticed a struggle the students were having with differentiating ‘evidence’ from ‘reasoning’. In many answers we saw that they were combining the two.
In this activity there were a few issues. The claim was good because it generated an emotional response in the students and it was relevant to their lives. Unfortunately, the way they were asked to do the evidence and reasoning pieces was too vague. If I were to redo this activity, I would use the analogy of the crime scene investigator. When entering a crime scene a detective can make an initial claim about what “appears” to have happened, but then they must gather objective evidence to prove it. Lastly, they must synthesize the evidence into an explanatory statement of reasoning. An investigator's reasoning is used in a court of law to convict criminals.
We were able to assess the student’s understanding by watching them put their answers in the Pear Deck.
I think that helping students master this scaffold is important. So in the future, just adding elements to the lesson, maybe other examples, that deliver the concepts in different ways to help them understand, would be helpful. Finding ways to enrich the lesson would be my goal.