Discourse Strategy: Eliciting Ideas
The goal of this discourse strategy is to elicit students’ understandings of a scientific idea in order to use this information to make instructional decisions. There are four dimensions of students’ experiences that should shape the direction of instruction:
- students’ partial understandings of the target ideas
- students’ alternative conceptions about the target ideas
- students’ everyday language that can be leveraged to help them understand scientific language related to the target idea
- students’ everyday experiences related to the target idea that can be leveraged in later instruction.
Download discourse tool for Eliciting Students’ Hypotheses
If you would like to see examples of this discourse in action, you can go to the following case pages:
- Janet teaching about fungi to middle school students
- Melissa teaching about forces and motion to middle school students (Ready later in 2010)
- Brian teaching the physics of sound to high school students
- Bethany teaching about the Gas Laws to high school students (Ready later in 2010)
