OpenSciEd Unit 8.3 · Lesson 08 · 8.B
Critically read scientific text to gather evidence to…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
8.B Critically read scientific text to gather evidence to explain the differences in the electric current produced by the computer (the cause) that results in a changing magnetic field within the speaker system (the effect).
What to do
A class checklist that you create for yourself can help you assess students’ abilities to meet these scientific practices and crosscutting concepts. This checklist should not be for public display but used as a tool for recording your assessment. The checklist can include students’ names and a column for recording how many times you heard or saw evidence of different elements. One element would be students adding a check mark to their two-column chart. Another would be students adding stars to the reading, and a third would be when you hear them discuss a cause-effect relationship from something they read with a partner. There is no minimum number of occurrences required for each of these that you should be looking for as you will get around to different groups at different times as you walk around the room. Here is an example chart you can make to record this:
Analysis
Communication
name
✔ Identifies ideas we figured out before
☆ Identifies new science ideas
Discusses a cause-effect relationship
Student 1
/ / /
/ / /
y
Student 2
/
/
y
Student 3
/ / / /
/ /
n
…...
If you run out of time to survey this during class or want a more exact measure of student analysis of the reading, you can ask students to turn in their annotated reading Music to My Ears along with their notebooks at the end of the lesson to analyze them both.