What’s Your Evidence?: Engaging K-5 Children in Constructing Explanations in Science

Successfully integrate scientific explanation into the classroom with a wealth of strategies including scenarios, examples of student writing, classroom video clips from across all science content areas, rubrics, and guidelines for designing assessment items.

This exciting new resource presents K-5 teachers with an effective framework that breaks down the complex practice of scientific explanation into four components-claim, evidence, reasoning, and rebuttal. Their model provides teachers with a concrete roadmap for enhancing students’ conceptual understanding and fostering their ability to think and communicate more scientifically by carefully analyzing evidence and backing up their claims.

The book includes step-by-step directions for presenting the framework to students; creating learning tasks that connect scientific explanation writing to lessons; providing curricular scaffolds (that fade over time) to support students in their writing; critiquing explanations and providing students with feedback; developing scientific explanation assessment tasks; and using the information from assessment tasks to inform instruction. Teachers will learn how to adapt their science content instruction in order to better meet the needs of all students.

Also includes a DVD showing the framework in action.