Strategy: Reflect as a class
Overview
Research shows that reflection and connecting with real-life situations are powerful and effective ways to build science sensemaking skills.
Reflect as a class
Research shows that reflection and connecting with real-life situations are powerful and effective ways to build science sensemaking skills.
Be flexible in how you encourage student reflection, and support students to share, hear, and learn from peer reflections.
- Return to and discuss pre-investigation predictions, or repeat class polls or brainstorms. Engage students in a conversation about how their ideas as a class have changed and why.
- Choose a few groups and show their data to the class. Have a spokesperson explain their data, what their group inferred from the data, and what they decided to claim.
- Use a whole-class discussion to talk about differences and/or similarities in the claims and any big differences in the data. Have students talk about which evidence seems reliable, and which claim seems strongest based on evidence.
- Pushing further: consider mapping or representing these different explanations visually for students to compare and contrast.
- Pushing further: Have students talk about how the different claims could be combined to create a more complete, whole-class explanation.