Helping students practice academic writing :Connecting "Cause" and "Effect"

I have once again become very interested in student literacy. Especially in how it can deepen student thinking and develop their understanding of the content through deliberate practice. Science teachers (at least this one does) get very fustrated with students answer "it gets faster". What gets faster? Why does it get faster? So, for me, the ability to connect cause and effect either the through connectives or verbs is a key strategy for students to practice.

This worksheet is designed to firstly give the rules and some explained examples. The examples show how changing the position of the cause and effect and/or the  "connective" can change the emphasis from being placed on the cause to being focused upon the effect. Simply put whatever is found at the end of the senetnce will have the emphasis; placing the cause before the effect places the emphasis on the effect; and vice versa.  The student response "it gets faster" is fine in short questions but will very quickly become meaningless whem explaning ideas that have multiple steps or factors in play. The examples are also used to highlight the need to locate the action, another key skill in (more complex) scientific explanations. Students are asked to label the Cause, Effect and COnnective to encourage a little metacognition on the structure of sentences.

The worksheet is designed to increase the cognitive load throughout, allowing students to embed this skill. The first task merely asks the students to select an appropriate connective. It also sets up more examples students can refer to, by having this as such a clozed exercise students get to interact with more complex scientific examples.

The second task again reduces cognitive load by asking students consider where the emphasis is. Is this a sentence that highlights the casue or the effect taking place. Again this task helps provide a range of examples, and labouring the content. It is hoped that this activity will encourage student to metacognitively consider how they write.

The third task is bigger step up asking students to rewrite the sentences to change their emphasis. The support that makes this leap of faith manageable is that all the information they need is in the example they are working on and in the previous tasks.

Finally students have a few  questions to answer. To complete this they need to infer what the emphasis needs to be, and then structure an answer. Although the questions have novel situations, they content is the same as in previous tasks so that students can focus on writing this well. The questions increase in difficulty with questions 1 and 2 are simple and straightforward to answer as either the cause or effect is given, while questions 3 and 4 students will need to workout what will happen and then explain it. The examples in Task 1, which uses the language of resultant force should support them in completing this

The following are useful generic links, with examples:
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=19204&section=5

https://www.learninghub.ac.nz/cause-and-effect-writing-structures/

If you would like a copy please click here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Iky47JvOhUfCb31bC-WnTmVphMJS4S8whEEqhxX_5WE/edit

Literacy, Assessment and Memory bundles. LAMB's

Way back in June 2018 our Science department  attempted to set out what we wanted our curriculum to be like, after our initial interleaving of the concepts. Since then we have been working towards this through our Wednesday CPD time, curriculum development tasks and through the idea of the weeks. Each part of our wish list depends upon the design of the curriculum, our choice of pedagogy and our skill as teachers to deliver it.

Reading this list again the prominence of Literacy, Assessment and Memory in what we value is very clear.

To ensure constructive alignment every SOW has

●     Learning Intention sheet for student books

●     Key ideas/ Misconceptions clearly identified for teachers

●     Pre- quizzes aligned to learning intentions

●     Been double checked against the syllabus

To ensure quality two way feedback every SOW has

●     A prequiz using an assessment grid

●     Marking tokens for each key ideas.

●     Tasks that have inbuilt self reflection and assessments

●     Useful demonstrate tasks for quick teacher feedback. (eg Hinge questions)

●     End of topic tests and/or is part of a summative test

●     Tasks to develop exam technique

To ensure development of student skills and knowledge (including literacy)

●     Regular opportunities to write in an extended way-with feedback

●     Read complex academic texts to develop student scientific vocabulary.

●     Tasks that develop vocabulary.

●     Tasks to practice scientific skills- with feedback

●     Tasks and marking tokens that focus on Required Practicals and associated language and skills.

●     Strategic homework

To ensure long term retention

●     Multiple exposure planned and made clear to teachers

●     SOWS are interleaved and spaced - 5 years.✓

●     Tasks to activate prior knowledge

●     Use of low stakes testing eg last year, last topic, last week,last lesson

●     Planned spaces between teaching and marking tokens.

●     Knowledge organiser for each topic

●     Strategic homework

To ensure clarity of teaching

●     Slides that structure and augment explanations- not necessarily to scaffold a lesson.

●     Clear useful diagrams, analogies, images

To ensure engagement

●     Task that set context and provide interesting hooks

●     Tasks develop student agency

Literacy

A good start point for the view taken on literacy comes from the EEF Literacy report that states

“Reading, writing, speaking and listening, are at the heart of every subject in secondary school. Focusing time and resources on improving reading and writing skills will have positive knock-on effects elsewhere, whether that’s being able to break down scientific vocabulary or structure a history essay.”

It recommends the

●     Prioritising of subject-specific literacy skills across the curriculum.

●     Teaching vocabulary to support pupils’ development of academic language.

●     Developing students’ ability to read and access sophisticated texts

So, it is with this in mind that we have developed our Literacy strand to our new Literacy, Assessment and Memory bundles (LAMB’s). This has been a major focus for the idea of the week since it began, and so we have many simple and effective strategies to hand. Many are summarised here: A summary of Literacy strategies

Assessment.

Macfarlane Dick and Nichol recommend  that good feedback practice:

1. helps clarify what good performance is (goals, criteria, expected standards);

2. facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning;

3. delivers high quality information to students about their learning;

4. encourages teacher and peer dialogue around learning;

5. encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem;

6. provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance

Providing effective feedback is a complex business, but two general principles seem to apply fairly consistently.

1. As students approach mastery a delay in feedback can be beneficial, for example after an exam or marking token .
2. Immediate feedback is beneficial when students are in the early stages of developing their understanding.

○     Task level feedback is only useful here

○     We must balance giving feedback and teaching new ideas as dealing with feedback uses a lot of working memory.

So, we must provide focussed opportunities to check student understanding that are quick and to the point but still aiming to meet all the criteria set out by Macfarlane- Dick and Nichol. It is especially important that the dialogue between teacher and student dialogue, as in the two way feedback on our wishlist. Ultimately,this will increase the amount of quality teacher feedback in books but reduce the burden of marking. This again has been a recurring theme in the ideas of the week. At the heart of these strategies is the idea of a hinge activity to reveal the student current understanding quickly and accurately.
Memory.

The Memory strand, as the others has been a major theme for idea of the week. A summary of the strategies can be read here The strategies include those that support the limitations of working memory and strategies that seek to encourage long term retention of knowledge.

Our pre-quizzes work on the The Pretesting Effect  which paints a somewhat counterintuitive view of learning and testing

“In terms of long-term learning, however, unsuccessful tests fall into the same category as a number of other effective learning phenomena - providing challenges for learners leads to low initial test performance, thereby alienating learners and educators, while simultaneously enhancing long-term learning.”

To supplement this retrieval practice is a way of supporting the retrieval strength of learned concepts. The students in essence practice how to remember. We have been long time fans of the expanding retrieval schedule and many of us have selected to measure its impact for the Great Teaching Groups. As Lee Croucher astutely pointed out this week, the design of these is somewhat responsive to how well students have performed in previous lessons, and this makes it more difficult to pre plan this kind of task. What we can prepare are question banks that will provide regular practice with the big, frequent and important ideas within them.

Conclusion.

A key strategy in learning is the idea of multiple exposures to the idea being learned Nuthall said

” Provided a student is able to piece together, in working memory, the equivalent of three complete definitions or descriptions of a concept, that new concept will be constructed as part of the students long term memory”

His research primarily suggests some useful planning suggestions. So that for learning to take place, students must:

interact with a full explanation of concept at least once.

interact with the information on at least four separate occasions

This makes the tasks in the LAMB’s so very useful, providing the opportunities to revisit the concepts over and over again in differing ways so that learning has the best chance to happen. Teaching followed by a literacy strategy, followed by a memory task followed by a focused assessment makes this a realistic aim.

Strategy is one thing and so it supporting teachers to feel equipped to use new them  So the ideas included in LAMB’s have been (and will be) supported by the idea of the weeks  to help us deliver the great curriculum our students deserve. Each task, in essence, is quite small, and  will not take long to plan. So relatively quickly it should be easy to build up a library of useful tasks- focused on key ideas and misconceptions.  Imagine a department of 10 (pretty easy for a Science, Maths or English department) contributed one task per week over the course of a year we could have around 380 tasks to support the development of our students' scientific  literacy and supporting their learning through quick and effective assessment and opportunity to transfer knowledge to their long term memory. It certainly is a worthy aim.

The first two LAMB's are available here.

What can teachers do to tackle student misconceptions? An example.

Posner and Strike (1992) suggest that the following conditions must be met if students are to correct their misconceptions (or to have them corrected):

• There must be some dissatisfaction with the student’s current understanding. Students are unlikely to be aware of these, and it therefore falls to us to make them purposefully aware of the ones they hold. This can be difficult, as theories” work for them perfectly well in their everyday lives, and we have to tutor students to become critical of their own thinking.
• The new conception must be intelligible or understandable to learners. This is where our skill in representing ideas specifically tailored to the learning needs of the students in front of us comes to the fore. Our assessment practices need to allow the students (and teachers) to see that they are ‘getting it’.
• The new conception must appear initially plausible; it must seem to be a better possible answer than the misconception. 
• Keeping our instruction ‘real’, rooted in what is known (i.e. their prior knowledge), making connections clear and using concrete examples all help students to alter their understanding of things.
• Finally, the new conception should suggest the possibility being fruitful or useful to them as learners. We can do this by helping students transfer their new understanding and applying it to new examples.

I would humbly add that the role of planned multiple exposures to the correct conception is also essential. Undermining hard held believes is going to take time to shift. 

Strategy 1: Encouaging dissatisfaction.

These tasks are designed to make students ware of the misconception, in a way the makes it absolutely clear that the student did not know that they did not know. For this to happen the alternate answers must at least seem plausible and contain the same kind of content as the correct answer.
The following example, fails to do this with only one plausible answer as John Fashanu, Noel Edmonds and Skeletor did not ride the Tour de France until the 1980's. That was a joke by the way, I point out this not as way of being facetious but as a way of emphasising that it is quite easy to accidently teach a misconception. 

For more on the design of multiple choice question I highly recommend this from Vanderbilt University

In this science example, students often think that the current comes from the battery, jumping out when the circuit is connected. In addition this misconception is linked to another where student believe the current is "used up".  So this dealing with this first will allow this idea to be transferred and applied to this situation. It is therefore going to be fruitful, and be part of a sequence of multiple exposures to the correct concept.

Note that only three options are given in this question , but importantly all answers are plausible.  So rather than sticking to a steadfast rule of  say "I will always give 5 options", the plausibility of the content takes precedence. 

When deliberately trying to exposure a misconception, I tend to do so with a whole class discussion. Using techniques that involves as many students as possible, for instance: asking for hands up fro each response, before asking a few students why they think what they do. Interestingly this year I had one student, almost instantly,  asking " is this about a metals delocalised electrons?" He knew the answer but was not confident about, so exposing it and reinforcing the correct answer can help those with and without significant prior knowledge on the content. If he had of been confident my tactic would have been to  defer my answer in an attempt to create a bit of ambiguity, to encourage dissatisfaction, and further thought. Normally stuidents think ( and they did even when this student spoke up) that the current comes from the battery. I try to avoid telling them that they are wrong, as I wan them to doubt it themselves first. So ambigous responses such as "mmm interetsing" help do this. 

Although, I may use a similar or even the same question in a Pre Quiz to a module, when attempting to incite some dissatisfaction with the student’s current understanding it is important that we focus on one concept at a time whenever possible. Clearly some misconceptions will have complex and interconnected reasosn so this is is not always possible. 

Strategy 2: A plausible and intelligible alternative

The next slide has my follow up to this discussion, I plan to not give the definitive answer until after the students have discussed the next slide. This slide is intended to make clear in the simplest possible terms what the correct idea is. In this case that the electrons that form the current are already present within the components of the circuit, and that on completion the battery provides a 'push' to make these charges flow. The visual shows this, and the open switch, allows for discussion of what the battery does. 

I often ask prompting questions, more or a less in this order:

1. What are the blue circles representing? 
2. What charge do they have?
3. Are they "flowing" or moving in this image? How do you know? 
4. What if the switch was closed, what would then happen? 
5. What do you notice about the amount of current before and after the component? 

This section of the lesson of the lesson attempts to do to things. Firstly have the students acknowledge that their origional think was indeed a misconception and, secondly,  present them with plausible and intelligible. Many students "get it" once they see the image and begin to articulate why they are wrong. 

I often go back to the origional question and ask who wants to change their mind. This is an importamt classroom cultural moment as praising this encourages thinking in what Doug Lemov would describe as a "culture of error". 

This image is a screen shot from the wonderful phet simulation. At this point the students are in now in need of a succinct and clear teacher summary of the correct answer, the simulation provides the perfect backdrop to this. 

Strategy 3: Realness.(Where possible)

In this lesson the students would then build a simple series circuit and measure the current at two points to show that this phenomena is real. This is also another exposure to this idea.

Strategy 4 Multiple exposure (within the lesson).

The lesson has a review based upon another model of current, comparing the bike chain to current and circuits. 

Students very quickly work out through discussion that the pedals represent the battery, the back wheel would be the component and the chain the wires. With minimal prompting they start to associate the links associate the links with the charge. following this further insights into the behaviour of current become clear. The links are evenly spaced; they dont move until they are pushed; they do not jump around the chainring (battery) if there is no pushing. This concrete example ( and therefore more plausible) helps students see their new knowledge as fruitful and leading to new understanding. 

Strategy 5: Multiple exposures (across lessons). 

As this topic develops other concepts must be added such as potential difference and resistance. These are opportunities to build on what hopefully will have become prior knowledge. A good example from future lessons is this classic teaching image. In the image the current is labelled as Amp and needs the push from the Potential difference (volt) to get moving. 

Strategy 6: Feedback.

Students are asked to describe in writing the relationship between the current, potential difference and resistance that is encaspsulated within the picture. They are asked to use the leave a line between each one that they write.  This provides a space where they can reflect on what they have written correct wrong ideas and add missing ones in the light of a model example; class discussion; teacher prompts; or teacher written feedback. 

A copy of the lesson resources are available here 

Assessing learner confidence.

“Doubt is the origin of wisdom.” Descartes.

It is sometimes useful to question a student’s confidence about a certain piece of knowledge so that we can find out the difference between what they actually know and what they have been able to deduce It is pretty easy to spot a student who ‘doesn’t know what they don’t know’. It is also fairly easy to spot their antithesis: the student who ‘knows what they know’. It is with the students in between these two poles who can form a grey area that can be tricky for teachers to interpret. The following crude table may help untangle students’ knowledge and their confidence in it. From this we can start to figure out what the next teaching steps could be, as students who are confident in their knowledge of a concept have different requirements those who are less confident.

Student’s knowledge is …	Confidence in this knowledge …	Also know as …	Potential initial teacher response
Wrong.	High.	A misconception (or in correct belief)	Make it clear why the answer is wrong. Provide lots of evidence/ ideas of the correct answer. Move them to wrong knowledge/ low confidence.
Wrong.	Middling.	Uncertainty.	Ask them why they think this? Make clear what their doubts are. Move them to wrong answer/low confidence.
Wrong.	Low.	A wild guess.	Give a clear correct explanation.
Right.	High.	Students know they know as well as how they know it. Expert.	Move on. Connect this knowledge to new knowledge.
Right.	Middling.	Students think they know this, but are uncertain.	Reinforce, review, reflect, and rehearse.
Right.	Low.	A lucky guess or hypothesis.	Praise correct answer. Ask why they think this? Move them to right answer/middling confidence.

How to get information on student confidence

To get information on student confidence in a concept, we must look beyond what is said and begin to look at how they are saying it. Here we are in similar territory to Radio Four’s ‘Just a Minute’ in which the panel must speak for a minute without “hesitation, deviation or repetition”. When we listen to (or read) student responses, we are constantly and subconsciously judging the confidence they have, instinctively clarifying things for those who appear confused, nodding in encouragement of those lack that are struggling with confidence. But this remains a process that operates at a liminal level of our consciousness; rarely do we ever bring these actions into being consciously, nor do we exploit the students’ responses as a form of data to inform our planning for them.

It is relatively straightforward to obtain information from these sorts of interactions that you and your students will find helpful. Again, like the light bulb example, the content needs to be significant for this to be worth doing.  Two helpful ways of structuring our assessment of student confidence are:

1. Making it explicit by using self-assessment.

2. Making it implicit within the task or question.

The first method, making it explicit, can be as simple as a multiple-choice question with an attached check box in which the student can indicate their level of confidence about their answer. Look at this number sequence, as an example:

-8.8, -9.0, -9.2, -9.4 …

What is the next number in the sequence?

A -8.6	I am ●     Sure about this ●     Fairly sure ●     Guessing
B -9.5
C -9.6
D -10

.The student complete the problem, and ticks the statement that best represents their confidence, which provides the teacher with two pieces of information to make decisions about what to do next. We can see how we would move student on who were correct and confident, where we may ask students to explain how they derived their answer for those who were correct but not confident in their response. For in correct responses we may decide to re-teach the concept. 

An alternative way of structuring pre-quiz questions to assess confidence is to simply make it as a potential student response in a multiple-choice question. By adding an “I don’t know” option allows students, to express doubt, rather than guess. Remember a correct guess will hide the information that you are seeking about student prior knowledge. 

An example question.

Which of the following are true?

A) In order to reduce manufacturing costs, companies make their products smaller.

B) In order to reduce manufacturing costs, companies computerize their production.

C) In order to reduce manufacturing costs, companies run nightshifts.

D) Both A and B.

E) Both A and C.

F) Both B and C.

G) No Idea.

The “I think this “ grid.

A more sophisticated structure may reveal useful information and engage student reflection about what they know and how well they know It can be drawn from this  well-designed tick grid. Consider this task taken from a History classroom.

Why was the Enabling Act so important?

Statement		I am sure this is right	I think this is right	I think this is wrong	I am sure this is wrong
A	It allowed Hitler to become President
B	It meant that Hitler had won the election
C	It allowed Hitler to make laws without the Reichstag
D	It gave the Nazis a majority in the Reichstag

This simple structure can be illuminating for teachers to base their classroom decisions on evidence that is there. Students that are sure about the correct statements may not reveal as much as students who are sure about incorrect ones, but perhaps the most useful aspect will come from the number of “ I think..” responses given. This begs the question for the teacher “How do I help the students become surer about the things they know?” and “Have the students been exposed to the information sufficiently to allow them to be confident? The seemingly simple structure, engages students in thinking about the content and how well they understand it. 

Tackling Misconceptions.

Encouragingly this simple technique, with questions focussed upon misconceptions and known student difficulties, can help provide one of the conditions needed for students to correct their misconceptions. Once more, a teachers Pedagogical Content Knowledge provides the insight necessary to design these questions.

This following Science example utilises some common misconceptions, and confusions to do this. There are also two correct answers, which adds a richness to the activity. If, as in most multiple choice questions, there was only one correct response, once figured out the students would stop thinking. To avoid student means end thinking these tasks should be introduced by stating “ All of these statements may be true, they may all be false or any combination of true and false” Ultimately we wish for students to be confident about the correct answer and the wrong ones. Why do solid ionic compounds do not conduct electricity?

Statement	I am sure this is right	I think this is right	I think this is wrong	I am sure this is wrong
The ions do not have enough space in between them
The ions can not move
There are no delocalised electrons
There are strong electrostatic forces of attraction

As Posner and Strike (1992) highlight that for students to overcome misconceptions there must be some dissatisfaction with their current understanding. Students are unlikely to be aware of these, and it therefore falls to us to make them purposefully aware of the ones they hold. This can be difficult, as theories” work for them perfectly well in their everyday lives, and we have to tutor students to become critical of their own thinking. By enabling students to doubt what they think, or doubt what the answer is, we can begin this process. From doubt the journey to wisdom begins.