Just justify – scaffolding recognition questions
Which energy store is increasing?
Which part of the cell is labelled (a)?
There are lots of questions in science and beyond that require students to recognise one “thing” out of a host of similar possibilities.
Today I was writing some practice Qs for Y9 Energy. I wanted students to practice recognising the stores of energy that were increasing/decreasing in a scenario. They needed to be able to choose from 8 options. How can this process be scaffolded?
Option 1: multiple choice.
Which energy store is increasing?
- A) kinetic energy store
- B) gravitational potential energy store
- C)… etc
Positives – forces students to answer.
Negatives – zero effort to just guess.
I opted to not do option 1. I want them to think a little beyond just naming. I want them to be able to justify their answer so that I know they’ve got it right for the right reasons.
Option 2: Name and justify
- Q1. which energy store is increasing?
- Q2. how do you know?
Positives – explains rationale behind the choice, less guessable.
Negatives – less scaffolded
This is how I started writing the practice. It seemed like I could delve into the rationale behind the choice better. Plus it would make them think a bit harder than just listing an energy store or two.
But if they get Q1 wrong, then they start to reinforce their wrongness by justifying the wrong thing and making everything more confusing for themselves.
Option 3 – Just justify
- Q1 – Explain why it is the kinetic energy store that is increasing in this scenario.
- Q2 – Explain why it is the gravitational potential energy store that is decreasing in this scenario.
I realised I was missing a trick.
For students to be able to recognise an option successfully, they have to first justify in their heads why that must be the answer. So this is how the practice questions should start – force students to go through lots of justifications before letting them go back to questions like in Option 2.
I think this would generalise to all scenarios where we need students to recognise anything from a large array of possibilities. Let me know if you have other examples!
This is probably a good concrete example where Bloom’s taxonomy is wrong. Justifying why it is energy store A is easier than Naming the energy store, even though the taxonomy would disagree.
