Handouts are available below

Big Idea

Teaching students how to use CER to craft an argument is done better if students have lab data to practice with. Ideally, this data is something that we measure through an experiment, but experimental data may be especially difficult to get on the first day or week of the new school year. So, today, I want to share a quick experiment you can do with your classes to get some interesting data they can analyze. This activity has students participate in an informal educational study themselves, which would help prepare them to write a CER statement based on their own experience.

Episode Notes

• There’s an app that was created in 2022 called bionic reading, which takes the text we upload and bolds the first few letters of each word. It’s supposed to help students with reading. But, does it actually help with reading? This is the question I wanted my students to answer through an informal classroom experiment they participated in.

• If you want to run this informal experiment with your students, it’s pretty straightforward. Before you begin, don’t tell students what the study is about. Give all the students a response form and a sheet with questions on it. Then, give half the class the text that is neutral and the other class with the text that is bionic. Have students read the passage and, after, note down how long it took them to read the passage (this means you’ll need to have a timer that students can see – I project mine on the whiteboard). After writing down the time, students can answer the questions. When it looks like everyone is done, now tell students there are two different text formats and have students note down on their response forms whether they had weird bolded text or normal text. Have students mark the questions and then collect and tabulate the results.

• I also gave students some sample data to analyze (click on handouts below to get sample data). As for the CER statements students wrote based on the data I provided before, for claim, students have stated that bionic reading helps improve reading. For evidence, they cited the quicker reading speeds while keeping the same level of accuracy. And, for reasoning, students who used the bolded text said that the bolded letters helped them skip over words and read faster – since our brains can recognize words by seeing only a few letters. For rebuttal, students said that there may be no effect at all or that bionic reading may be worse for students – but that the sample size was too small to see this effect – which is absolutely correct because this sample only has about 30 students. 

Thanks for watching, and let’s talk science education again soon.

Resources

Handout(s): Ep65 Handouts – How to Introduce CER Using Bionic Reading Activity

Our resources are free. We aren’t collecting emails for our resources. However, it would help us out if you liked us on our Facebook page and subscribed to our Youtube Channel. Thanks!