Evidence-Based Science Activities in Grades 3–5

Meeting the NGSS

Patrick Brown, James Concannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429627118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new book shows elementary teachers how evidence-based science activities help students achieve deeper conceptual understanding. Drawing on a wealth of research, authors Patrick Brown and James Concannon demonstrate how direct, hands-on experience in the science classroom can enable your students to become more self-reliant learners. They also provide a plethora of model lessons aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and offer advice on how to create your lesson plans and activities to satisfy the demands of your curriculum. With the resources in this book, you and your students will be able to ditch the textbook and embark upon an exciting and rewarding journey to scientific discovery.

1
What Are the Features of Evidence-Driven Science Activities?

Patrick Brown and James Concannon

Learning about learning can be both eye-opening and exciting. In particular, understanding how students construct knowledge and their innate reasoning abilities is vital to effective science teaching. These intricate and complex subjects can be one of the most exciting challenges of teaching. Many individuals have made substantial contributions to our understanding of how students learn science best, and the knowledge base is still growing as we better learn about factors that influence cognition. The well-established consensus is that students learn science best when they have opportunities to construct knowledge (termed constructivism) related to their prior experiences and ideas.

Learning theory and the innate skills that students bring to school and science classrooms can go hand in hand. Kids love to explore the world and explain how nature works. They form ideas about the causes for the changing of the seasons, create theories about the phases of the moon, and try to describe why they have some physical characteristics like their parents. These are just a few of the many science areas that students have ideas about based on their experiences. Students at a very early age think logically about their environment and look for patterns and relationships to construct explanations for science. Regardless of the accuracy of their ideas, students’ immediate experiences are the basis for how they know and understand the world. From a very early age, students construct knowledge of scientific phenomena.

While students’ scientific understandings can be a great starting point for instruction, they can also act as a barrier to gaining knowledge. Research in the cognitive sciences and science education demonstrates the implications of students’ prior knowledge, and particularly their misconceptions, on learning (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000). Prior knowledge is an important consideration in teaching, and students’ incoming ideas, including misconceptions, must be addressed for them to gain a more accurate and complete scientific understanding. In fact, many resources identify typical misconceptions in many different science disciplines (see Driver, Squires, Rushworth, and Wood-Robinson 1994), and several books offer engaging ways to elicit students’ science views (see Keeley and Tugel 2009; Keeley, Eberle, Tugel, and Dorsey 2008; Keeley, Eberle, and Tugel 2007; Keeley, Eberle, and Farrin 2005).

The reason prior knowledge is so necessary for teaching relates back to the early 1980s and conceptual change research. This continued line of research clearly shows that the most potent and influential instructional sequences require a purposeful interaction between students’ incorrect or partially incomplete ideas with direct experiences to develop more plausible, intelligible, and fruitful explanations (Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog 1982). For students to accommodate new information, they must first become dissatisfied with their current conceptions. Many times teachers can promote dissatisfaction by providing opportunities for students to collect data and scientific evidence that cannot be explained when students rely upon their incomplete understandings. Learning facts is not enough to improve students’ understanding of science. To understand science, students need opportunities to view new ideas in broader contexts of meaning. More recently, several scholarly books provide research supporting constructivist approaches and advocate building on students’ prior knowledge in authentic learning situations (see Duschl, Schweingruber, and Shouse 2007; Michaels, Shouse, and Schweingruber 2008).

From a conceptual change perspective, instruction should start with assessing students’ incoming ideas. If a teacher’s entry point into a lesson does not begin with students’ prior knowledge, conceptual misunderstandings may arise whereby students assimilate new information to their existing inaccurate foundation of knowledge (Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog 1982). By knowing students’ prior knowledge and experiences, teachers can choose the best types of experiences to create dissatisfaction. The best experiences are ones whereby students are provided evidence-based experiences to construct knowledge. The logic is simple. If students have reliable and valid experiences that produce data and evidence, and students construct knowledge based on the evidence, then their conceptual understanding is based on their firsthand experiences. From a neurological standpoint, students’ knowledge is firmly entrenched in their brains because they developed the ideas firsthand. Students have an enormous capacity to reason at very sophisticated levels from teaching approaches that productively scaffold their developing content knowledge and science reasoning skills.

Evidence-Driven Science Activities

If the ultimate goal is for students to derive understanding from experiences, then we must carefully consider our professional practices. While hands-on learning can naturally be engaging for students, the experiences must be carefully woven into the flow of instruction to produce the desired outcomes. What are the desired incomes? A significant finding from America’s Lab report is that many students view science as a “false dichotomy,” meaning that students think that the hands-on, “doing” part of science is separate from content (Singer, Hilton, and Schweingruber 2006). As a result, the desired outcomes are for students to discard incorrect ideas, accept the most accurate scientific explanations, and for students to learn the nature by which these science explanations are generated. Evidence-driven science activities allow teachers to meet these goals by first providing students with immediate experiences to form accurate understandings; and second, by connecting student’s claims to scientifically accepted explanations. Connections happen when teachers purposefully link evidence from explorations to evidence-based explanations. Lectures, readings, and discussions can further support explanations. In sum, evidence-driven science activities require a unique combination of students’ evidence-based experiences, students’ scientific claims, and the teacher connecting students’ claims to our current understandings of scientific phenomena.

Because student construction of knowledge is imperative to learning, we need to get students to the point from our classroom experience that they can accurately explain some vital aspect of the desired content from data and evidence gleaned from firsthand experiences. In other words, we need to push students to intellectually engage with data and evidence from hands-on experiences in a way that promotes long-lasting understanding. One highly beneficial way to promote student science learning, and learning in general, is to use writing in science. Instructional approaches that integrate science and other areas are supported by cognitive science research that suggests students need to organize ideas in meaningful and relevant ways (Donovan and Bransford 2005).

Claims-Evidence-Reasoning (C-E-R)

The sequence of students having inquiry experiences that produce data and evidence, forming claims about what happened, supporting claims with data, and justifying why the data supports the claim is the goal of evidence-driven science activities. There are multiple benefits to having students write in science, and research shows that students who engage in explaining ideas learn science better than students who only record ideas (Hand, Prain, and Yore 2001).

Regarding the three components (claims, evidence, and reasoning), students’ claims typically represent what they can explain on a conceptual level about science. Students’ claims are not factoids and typically are big ideas relevant to the discipline. Students claims are dependent on their experiences with evidence.

Evidence represents the accumulation of convincing data that supports the claim and is more than just one data point. One of the critical aspects in having students use evidence to make claims is to think logically about patterns, trends, and any relationships present in data. Once students have reliable data, they need to make sense of the information. Students benefit from thinking about the high and low data points across multiple trials and whether different factors change or remain the same in the investigation.

The reasoning statement asks students to explain the underlying scientific principles associated with the phenomena under study. Constructing reasoning statements is challenging because it requires students to link the evidence with the overarching claim and then explain the broader underlying scientific principles. Creating the reasoning statement might require discussions of appropriate scientific principles to explain the claim-evidence link. Some students struggle with explaining scientific principles, and helping them co-construct these ideas during teacher explanations is a way to build their understanding. From a cognitive standpoint, constructing the reasoning with students in light of their evidence-based claims is a way to entrench ideas and helps them develop sound reasoning skills and conceptual understanding. Thus, constructing the reasoning statement with students is a way to integrate labs and other forms of instruction like labs and lectures and textbook readings (McNeill and Krajcik 2012).

If students have done the hard intellectual work of constructing an evidence-based claim, then teachers can promote a more profound understanding by building a reasoning statement with their classes. What teachers should keep in mind is that many times the scientific principles that constitute the rationale can go beyond the investigation students are presently conducting. Many times, the scientific principles may have taken scientists hundreds of years to invent and involved numerous different investigations. Constructing the rationale with students allows them to place what they have learned in a broader framework for understanding to have a more coherent understanding.

Through our work with many students and teachers, we arrive at claims-evidence-reasoning through research-based instructional practices referred to here as pathways. Each of the model lessons (Chapters 6–10) illustrate how students can create evidence-based claims and how teachers can introduce scientific terminology that defines the principles and concepts. For example, in Chapter 7, “Students Use of the PSOE to Understand Weather and Climate,” you will learn how to sequence a demonstration so students understand thermal energy flow. The principle and science term that describes energy flow is convection and introduced by the teacher after students have constructed conceptual knowledge based on firsthand evidence. Introducing the term convection in light of students’ firsthand experiences is an intense time in learning and helps develop their scientific vocabulary in context. The model lessons show how using a research-based pathway allows students to construct C-E-R statements.

As teachers become more familiar with each of our approaches, aspects of each pathway become evident in the model lessons that allow students to construct evidence-based claims. Reflecting on the model lessons in respects to the three pathways helps develop knowledge of one approach and will strengthen teachers’ abilities to design lessons using multiple pathways in tandem. The end goal is to use one pathway on its own or in combination with another, tied to every lesson taught.

Further Reading

Bransford, J., A. Brown, and R. Cocking. 2000. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Donovan, M.S., and J.D. Bransford. 2005. How students learn: History, mathematics, and science on the classroom. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Driver, R., A. Squires, P. Rushworth, and V. Wood-Robinson. 1994. Making sense of secondary science. London: Routledge.

Duschl, R.A., H.A. Schweingruber, and A.W. Shouse, eds. 2007. Taking science to school: Learning and teaching science in grades K—8. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Hand, B., V. Prain, and L. Yore. 2001. Sequential writing tasks’ influence on science writing. In Writing as a learning tool: Integrating theory and practice, eds. P. Tynjala, L. Mason, and K Lonka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.

Keeley, P., and J. Tugel. 2009. Uncovering student ideas in science. 25 New formative assessment probes. Vol. 4. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association Press.

Keeley, P., F. Eberle, and L. Farrin. 2005. Understanding student ideas in science. 25 Formative assessment probes. Vol. 1. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association Press.

Keeley, P., F. Eberle, and J. Tugel. 2007. Understanding student ideas in science. 25 more formative assessment probes. Vol. 2. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association Press.

Keeley, P., F. Eberle, J. Tugel, and C. Dorsey. 2008. Uncovering student ideas in science. Another 25 formative assessment probes. Vol. 3. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association Press.

McNeill, K.L., and J. Krajcik. 2012. Supporting grade 5–8 students in constructing explanations in science: The claim, evidence and reasoning framework for talk and writing. New York: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.

Michaels, S., A.W. Shouse, and H.A. Schweingruber. 2008. Ready, set, science! Putting research to work in K-8 science classrooms. Board on Science Education, Center for Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Science and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. www.nap.edu/catalog/11882/ready-set-science-putting-research-to-work-in-k-8#toc

Posner, G.J., K.A. Strike, P.W. Hewson, and W.A. Gertzog. 1982. Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66, 211–227.

Singer, S.R., M.L. Hilton, and H.A. Schweingruber, eds. 2006. America’s lab report: Investigations in high school science. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

2
Sequencing Science Instruction as a Pathway to Evidence-Driven Science Activities

Patrick Brown and James Concannon

Science instruction should be sequenced where students explore before teachers introduce science terminology, ideas, or concepts. We call this explore-before-explain teaching and can be accomplished through tried-and-true sequences of instruction such as the learning cycle. The learning cycle includes three sequential phases: (1) exploration, (2) invention (term introduction), (3) discovery (concept application) (Karplus and Their 1967). When employing the learning cycle, students have experiences with data (exploration) that is then used by students to construct accurate evidence-based claims (the student portion of the invention phase). Students’ evidence-based claims are the foundation for their understanding and used to introduce key science terms, concepts, and supporting idea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What Are the Features of Evidence-Driven Science Activities?
• 2. Sequencing Science Instruction as a Pathway to Evidence-Driven Science Activities
• 3. Using Classroom Inquiry as a Pathway to Evidence-Driven Science Activities
• 4. Using Phenomenon-Based Teaching as a Pathway to Evidence-Driven Science Activities
• 5. Connecting to Contemporary National Science Standards
• 6. Engage Students in Designing Experiments so Hands-on Science Does Not Spiral Out of Control
• 7. Students Use of the PSOE Model to Understand Weather and Climate
• 8. Two-Liter Bottles and Botanical Gardens: Using Inquiry to Learn Ecology
• 9. Enhancing Elementary Students’ Experiences Learning About Circuits Using an Exploration-Explanation Instructional Sequence
• 10. Elementary Students’ Investigations in Natural Selection
• 11. Lessons Learned