Educator Cross-Share

Amanda Spence

Helping students choose evidence from readings

The Challenge:

My students struggle to identify strong evidence from news and science articles.

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The Challenge

What challenge or need were you responding to?

Each year I ask my students to research a climate change “action,” and I have found that my students struggle to find specific evidence to support their argument.

What were you curious about experimenting with?

My goal going into this semester was to give my students frequent practice reading news and science articles, and to provide my students with strategies for identifying specific evidence from those articles.

What I Tried

The first strategy I tried…

Evidence Carousel

• I posted ten quotes from a reading “Tattoos: The good, the bad, the bumpy” around the classroom
• Students rotated to different stations to read and discuss the quotes
• They identified if the quote provided evidence that tattoos were good or bad for your health or if the quote was neutral
• Students then wrote a CER and included the quotes in their evidence

My hope was…

The results were…

• Students would be less overwhelmed by the dense text when they only had to read it in short sections, printed in large font, with a partner.
• Students would be able to choose the best evidence to use in their CER from ten pre-selected quotes, instead of the whole article

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• Most students were successful at classifying quotes as “good,” “bad,” or “neutral.”
• Students missed some of the context by only reading excerpts
• I did not use a graphic organizer or ask students to write down the quotes, so they had to go back to find the quotes when they wrote their CERs

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Another strategy I tried…

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Reading for a purpose

• Students were given several readings and a specific purpose for their reading: find quotes that support and oppose Gene Editing
• In this round of articles I focused on pre-teaching the topic and using headlines to predict the what would be in the reading

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• Supports:
• Preview content/vocab with videos and discussion
• Making predictions
• Narrow focus for reading
• Color-coded highlighting (evidence for/evidence against)
• Graphic organizer

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Early impact

So with my students, I have started to notice…

• When the reading task is more narrow in scope, students are able to identify important quotes and classify evidence.
• Readings are frequent so there is less resistance when I pass out an article.
• Some students are asking better questions and making more connections to their learning

What I Learned

Key ingredients: what made this work?

# 1 Pre-reading strategies

• providing a specific purpose/framework/question for reading
• previewing the science content
• making predictions based on the headline

#2 Frequent practice with readings, even just sections

• Making reading less intimidating (large fonts, numbered paragraphs)
• A routine part of the class

#3 Teacher prep: focus more on choosing articles and providing context, instead of modifying readings

• Finding interesting, relevant articles is more important than finding readings “at level”
• Preparing students for the vocabulary and the content

Next steps...

I want to keep: Experiment with:

Reading for a Purpose

• Support/Oppose
• Problems/Solutions
• Genes vs. Environment

Frequent reading tasks

• Sourced primarily from Newsela and Science News Explores
• Printed articles, not on screens

Explicit pre-reading strategies

• Teaching students when to use a direct quote and when to summarize a passage in their writing
• Having students select articles they want to read and practice the “pre-reading” strategies independently

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Thank you!