Ms. Hohenemser

We started to work on a concept called claim evidence and reasoning or CER. It is a way of writing scientific explanations. Students/scientists come up with a claim which is often in our class a response to a question from the teacher. For example this week we are studying batteries. We built a battery and manipulated it’s parts and tested several “what if” questions the students had about the battery. (For example what if instead of a copper and a zinc electrode we used only zinc electrodes.) The question I asked was: What are the parts of a battery that are necessary for it to work? Students then made a claim that certain parts were required to make a battery work. They then needed to provide three pieces of evidence on the CER template and then link each piece of evidence to the claim using reasoning. The reasoning should use some kind of scientific concept or principle. When they were done I asked them to turn their Claim, Evidence Reasoning into a paragraph form. What most end up with is a complete answer to the initial question. I showed the video below to get us started. Generously the maker of the video provided me with materials (template and rubric) to help students organize their thinking.