- CER, or claim-evidence reasoning should be connected to our world right now. The ability for people to make a claim supported by evidence and reasoning is so important in students forming their own opinion and being able to articulate why they did. There is so much information out in the world right now, and this kind of reasoning is essential for students to form their own opinions and thoughts about everything in this world.
- One recent task that students had in my class was to discover the trigonometric ratios and why they work with some exploration with triangles and the ratios of their sides. Students did an experiment and made a claim about what they noticed about the ratio of the sides of similar triangles. They then gave evidence through tables and their work in the desmos in general. Students then had to explain they they made the claim they did and used the claim in their work with trigonometry.
- Teacher Desmos:-https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5eaddcb717a3e10c7960af53
- Students did a great job with this activity. Many students were able to work together to come to a similar conclusion and make a claim about what they noticed. Students remained engaged and we actually split up the class and had the in-person students working on 40 degree triangles and the online virtual students working on 50 degree triangles. It was cool to see them observe each others' data and make conclusions which were similar even though they worked with different triangles.
- The pros of this activity were that it was mostly discovery based, which had the students very engaged. One con was that it was hard for students to make that immediate connection between the ratios of the sides of similar triangles and then using trigonometry and the trigonometric functions to solve problems.
- Students were asked on several slides to reflect upon what they noticed, and the end of the desmos proved whether or not students were able to make those connections between their noticings and trigonometry.