We have seen some teachers shift to develop a real culture of argumentation in their classroom, but I absolutely think it is a challenge. We need to help teachers how argumentation, and the science practices more broadly, can be used to really shift the culture of classrooms to be more student-directed and focused on the use and evaluation of evidence. In some of our case study work on this project, we observed some classrooms engaged in "pseudoargumentation" in which they were renaming previous more traditional instruction as argumentation. As a community, I think we need to help teachers problematize and reflect on what this looks like in their classrooms. 

That makes a lot of sense to me. I think previous classroom norms and cultures can offer different images of classroom discourse then the argumentation goals. I agree that students' perceptions can be quite different then what the teacher wants. I also think teachers' perceptions can be quite different then the goals of the curriculum designers. 

Hi Heidi, 

Thank you for your comment! We intentionally did not require a registration because we wanted to create a free resource for all educators to use (in whatever way they needed) as they shift their instruction to meet the demands described in recent reform documents and standards. 

We have not examined the impact of this website yet, per se, although we have looked at the back end data to see how it's being used (which tabs are people clicking on the most?). We are excited to see that the teacher learning modules are being used frequently! Specifically, since we posted the first module in June 2016 until January 2017 (when we last checked), we have had 10,508 unique page views. And since that time point we know that numerous different people (e.g. teacher educators, district science leaders), including ourselves, have used them to support both pre and in-service teachers' learning of scientific argumentation. 

We hope you enjoy this resource! 

Hello Jennifer,

We are so glad that you will be sharing this resource with others. I should mention that educators really enjoy having the opportunity to work with colleagues and to experience this science practice from the perspective of students. It helps them better understand challenges that their students might face. Also, we have found that giving teachers the opportunity to then reflect on these learning experiences with colleagues is invaluable! 

Hi Jennifer! Thank you for your message. We'd love to hear how you apply some of these ideas to your work in math education. In terms of the card sorting activity- this is a very popular approach for supporting students as they make sense of evidence. There are a few variations of the card sort. For instance, it can be used to help students consider whether potential evidence supports, doesn't support or maybe supports a particular claim (check out Card Sort 1 here: http://www.argumentationtoolkit.org/session-12....). In another version, students might consider which of two competing claims the evidence best supports (check out Card Sort 2 here: http://www.argumentationtoolkit.org/session-21....). In both variations of this argumentation task, we encourage students to voice their rationales during the sort (i.e., why are they sorting cards the way that they are?). We've found this to be very useful for helping them articulate their reasoning. 

The wonderful this about this argumentation activity is that it can be used in many ways in order to best fit the need of students. It's also very social in nature (as students are usually working in pairs or small groups during it) so it also attends to the interactive nature of argumentation. 

Thanks for your feedback and question Rachel! It is a new activity structure to me that my colleagues at the Lawrence Hall of Science (Suzy Loper) introduced me to. Your comment made me think that I don't think we have published anything that uses this activity (though we are working on a practitioner piece now). I really like the activity, because it makes students think about the quality of the evidence - such as the source - and what counts as strong scientific evidence. To me, evidence is observations and data about the natural world. Furthermore, evidence should be able to be replicated by others. Students (and teachers) are inundated with information from the media, some of which I think counts as "evidence" and other information that I do not think counts. The act of ranking evidence can help them think and talk about what counts as strong evidence. 

If you go to this webpage - http://www.argumentationtoolkit.org/session-2.html - you can download a sample activity where students consider a variety of pieces of evidence from a journal article, a friend, an opinion piece, etc. 

Thanks Katherine! I'm glad I didn't completely miss something! I do agree that this is a timely addition to the way we think about evidence-and want to encourage our students to think about it. Being able to sift through and evaluate evidence is a critical part of scientific literacy-and life, these days. I will certainly take a look at the activity on the website, and look forward to further discussion of this aspect.