Resources
This section includes two additional resources that cut across the four elements:
Strategy Guides
These Strategy Guides are text based resources providing teachers with lesson plan ideas about how to effectively integrate argumentation into their science lessons.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Analyzing Visual Representations: How Earthquakes Cause Tsunamis
This strategy guide introduces an approach for teaching how to analyze visual representations in science texts. By using the method of Active Reading, students annotate the text and visual representations to highlight important information.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Combining Simulations and Text to Support Scientific Explanations: Gravity and Orbits
This strategy guide introduces how to combine simulations and text to support students in creating scientific explanations, an approach for providing a rich, multimodal learning experience. Students can deepen their understanding about key science concepts when they learn about those concepts in different formats.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Engaging in Argumentation with a Science Seminar: Regional Climate in the Atacama Desert
This strategy guide introduces the Science Seminar, an approach for teaching students how to engage in oral and written argumentation, which helps them begin to master ways of thinking and communicating that are specific to the discipline of science. In a Science Seminar, the emphasis is on supporting claims with scientific evidence and reasoning that is based on a strong understanding of science concepts.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Engaging in Shared-Expertise Discussions: Regional Climate
This strategy guide introduces Shared-Expertise Discussions. Students work with partners to become experts on one example of a concept and then work in heterogeneous groups to engage in a collaborative task that requires drawing upon the knowledge that each group member brings. Pure discussion and collaboration helps students process and make sense of science concepts as well as engage in academic discourse.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Engaging in Socioscientific Argumentation: Increasing Oxygen in the Blood
This strategy guide introduces students to writing a socioscientific argument, which is based on scientific evidence and also brings in students’ value-based opinions. Complex critical thinking and reasoning based on scientific evidence, as well as the scientific ideas that students have learned, helps students see that science is relevant to daily life and promotes evidence-based decision-making.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Engaging with Text Through Active Reading: Wind Currents
This strategy guide introduces Active Reading, an approach to teaching students how to read science text deeply and carefully. Through engaging in the practice of obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information from text, students can begin to master the ways of thinking and communicating that are specific to the discipline of science and that will enable them to build an understanding of key science ideas.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Focusing on Key Ideas with an Anticipation Guide: The Human Microbiome
This strategy guide introduces an approach for teaching students to focus on key ideas by using an anticipation guide. With an anticipation guide, students learn how to activate their background knowledge, focus their reading, and support statements with evidence from text.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Reading for a Purpose: Molecules the Human Body Needs
This strategy guide introduces an approach for having students read reference texts for a purpose. Students learn to identify appropriate sections of a reference text to read in order to gather evidence to answer a focus question.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Reteaching Loop: Identifying Basic Components of Strong Argumentation Writing by Analyzing Student Work
This strategy guide provides students with a baseline understanding of the components of argumentation writing that they can apply to more complex arguments they will write on their own in the future.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Reteaching Loop: Practicing Oral Discourse Skills
This strategy guide provides an opportunity for students to practice oral argumentation skills without the extra cognitive burden that reading and writing can bring.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Reteaching Loop: Reading Arguments
This strategy guide is intended to support students who have had some exposure to the basic components of scientific argumentation but who need more support in breaking down and understanding the arguments they read.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Reteaching Loop: Understanding the Role of Relevant Evidence in Supporting a Claim
This strategy guide helps students practice thinking about relevant and irrelevant evidence and articulating reasoning so they will have a common shared experience to refer to as they write later in the year.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Reteaching Loop: Using the Reasoning Tool to Develop a Strong Written Argument
This strategy guide supports students as they learn to make convincing arguments about more complex scientific phenomena as they learn that reasoning is the process of making clear how evidence supports a claim.
Middle School Strategy Guide – Supporting Claims with Evidence by Using an Argumentation Cart Sort: Fossils
This strategy guide introduces an approach for teaching students to focus on key ideas by using an anticipation guide. With an anticipation guide, students learn how to activate their background knowledge, focus their reading, and support statements with evidence from text.
Extended Classroom Videos
These unedited classroom videos are between 2 and 20 minutes long. They include students actively engaging in argumentation across a variety of activities (e.g. science seminar, card sort) and student configurations (e.g. small group and large group).
Science Seminar
Class Discussion
Small Group Discussion
Partner Discussion