[Music] hi it's Paul Anderson and in this video I want to talk about CER it's a framework for making explanations in the science classroom it's a skill that teachers should give their students and students should have if they want to improve their scores on lab writeups on essays or on big exams but before we talk about CER let's talk about science in general in science what we're doing is gathering evidence through investigations of the natural world we're then coming up with explanations that are critiqued over time but unfortunately a lot of the time in a science classroom the investigations are developed by the teacher itself and the students are just going through a cookbook lab and so we want to avoid that if we can but also we spend too much time on the investigation itself on the variables and controlling the variables and then when we get to the end of coming up with an explanation of what we learned we kind of fall down on that point and so the CER is a framework that makes this explanation making explicit it was developed by Dr Kate mcneel and Dr Joe cek I'll put links to some of their material down below but it's an acronym the C stands for claim the E stands for evidence and the r stands for reasoning sometimes you'll hear rebuttle at it at the end of that that's looking at somebody else's claim evidence and reasoning um but this is my model for how claim evidence reasoning Works claim is an answer to a question that's asked evidence is going to be what you gather empirical evidence that gathered that's gathered in the lab or through research and then reasoning is going to be a logical connection between the evidence and the claim that you're trying to make now students will generally do really good at the evidence Gathering but they fall down when it comes to this logical connection and so a good tip is to make sure that your reasoning is based in some kind of a scientific definition rule principle that's a way that in science we can all agree on that now what should a teacher provide a teacher should simply provide a good question and a way to answer that question so let's say in the science classroom I give my students a bunch of dice but they're different looking dice they're skew dice that look like this and I ask them the following question are these skew dice Fair now they could start Gathering uh evidence right away they could roll the dice a bunch of times we could measure the dice look at their center of gravity maybe measure all of the sides to make sure that they're all the same but before we jump in and start doing evidence make sure that you've actually framed the question and you understand what's being asked make sure that you could Define everything that's in this this question itself I I'm sure you know what skew dice is but are we all in agreement with what it is to be fair well let's define it fair is this idea that each side has an equal probability of ending up on top now once we have that definition you can use that in that logical connection let's get to an actual science uh question that we could answer is air matter that's a question you can answer in the science laboratory before we dig in and start Gathering evidence however we should frame the question and make sure that we understand what every term in there means so what is air air is an invisible substance that surrounds the Earth what what is matter matter is anything that has mass and takes up space um what else do we know about matter it can be neither created nor destroyed so sometimes it's helpful at the beginning to get all of these listed out so that we can use them at a later date now we can use a form like this to do our claim evidence reasoning claim is going to be an answer to the question but generally we don't start there we have to start by gathering evidence so perhaps I take a balloon put it on a scale and then I fill up a balloon and put it on the same scale I'm trying to show that there's an increase in mass and then maybe I want to look at the takes up space side of the matter maybe I take a bottle filled with water pump air into it and I can displace some of that water and so now I can make a claim yes air is matter that's going to be my claim I've gathered evidence but now how do I do the reasoning well the reasoning is easier if it's tied to one of those scientific definitions that I had before so let me read you my reasoning uh the mass of the balloon increased when air was added indicating that the air had Mass the air displaced a volume of water indicating that the air also has a volume since matter must have both mass and volume my evidence suggests that air is matter that reasoning part is what we hope our students will start to write and they never do generally when they're doing a lab write up they simply tell us the evidence they gathered over and over and over in more detail but what we really want is a connection between the evidence that you gathered and the explanation that you're trying to make now we could do a rebuttal on that we could say well let's look at the evidence here um you blew this up so that's air coming from your lungs so it's not coming from the environment so that could impact it maybe it's water there and also it looks like there's air right here um and so are you really measuring air or are we measuring air pressure and so now we can have argumentation or we can talk about the evidence or the reasoning now all you do when you're doing Labs that use claim evidence reasoning is just give them a good question and a material to answer the question I could give them a bunch of magnets and I could say which of these is the strongest give them a bunch of paper clips rulers whatever um rubber bands washers and they have to answer this question the first question they should ask you as a teacher however is let's make sure we frame the question and Define everything inside it what is magnetic strength and if we say it's a measure of the attractiveness or attractive force between a magnet and magnetic material do we know what a force is once we have all of these definitions out there it's easier for you to do a claim evidence reasoning now these are pretty lowlevel science questions we could do it in a chemistry lab as well one thing that puzzles students a lot of the time is when you boil water it gets to around 100° C and then it stays there I used to have kids who would look at their thermometer and thought it was somehow broken but we have this curve that looks like this so as we heat something up as we apply heat to it as it goes from a solid to a liquid to a gas we get these plateaus where the temperature stays the same so I could ask them a question what happens to the energy during a phase change what happens to the energy right here and so what they should be doing is coming up with an explanation they should be coming up with a claim how should they do that number one frame what the question is asking uh do we know what energy is do we know what a phase change is do we know anything things that might be applicable to energy like the law of conservation of energy now they're going to gather a bunch of evidence what's some relevant evidence we can see we're a phase change from liquid to gas is occurring right here we see during this time that we're adding heat but the temperature is not going up and so you could gather a bunch of evidence but then making that connection making the reasoning it's going to be based in some kind of a principle and you could try to make that connection down below you could write your reasoning in the comments if you wanted to so what is claim evidence and reasoning it's a way to make explanations and if you step through those three parts when you're ever asked to explain what you learned as long as you say here's my claim here's the evidence and here's the reasoning to back it up you're going to do much better than you have in the past I want to thank Krist Rin uh he put this forward as an idea of a video if you have a suggestion for a video you'd like me to make put it again in the comments down below uh but that's claim evidence reasoning and I hope that was [Music] helpful