Stage 3: Negotiating Ideas and Evidence Through Tasks

Equity Approach #1: As students engage in tasks that introduce new science ideas and evidence, it’s critical to structure participation so that all students have consistent and meaningful opportunities to contribute. Use group roles, norms, and facilitation strategies that prevent domination by a few voices and encourage collaborative sensemaking. Provide scaffolds—such as partially completed models, sentence starters, visual aids, or multilingual supports—to help all students participate in constructing explanations and revising models. Encourage multiple modalities of engagement (e.g., drawing, gesturing, verbalizing) to broaden access and affirm diverse ways of showing understanding.

Equity Approach #2: To increase achievement, representation, and identification with science and engineering in this stage of the unit, students are afforded multiple opportunities to recognize and be recognized for the contributions they make in helping the class make sense of an idea or investigation in tasks and consider how what they are learning helps explain something about the anchoring phenomenon. Seek opportunities to explicitly and publicly provide space for other students or you to recognize their contributions. Also, consider how you can position students to reflect on their own contribution so they can recognize themselves as capable contributors to resolve their own or the class's questions. This is part of helping students develop narratives about themselves as a person who can contribute to science and engineering in ways that matter to them.

Equity Approach #3: To expand what constitutes science and engineering, commit to being flexible in how students are able to engage in tasks. Consider whether preferred student ways of communicating, through diverse communication practices like storytelling, digital media production, and perspective taking, can be encouraged as part of engaging in and completing tasks within this stage. Also, continue to seek to understand the connections students are trying to make, not as an assessment about whether their ideas are right or wrong, but instead as a potentially useful connection they are trying to make between something they previously experienced or recognized and the sensemaking in which they are currently engaged. 

Equity Approach #4: Stage 3 provides a powerful opening to link scientific reasoning with students’ emerging ideas about social or environmental justice. As students analyze evidence, surface patterns, and refine models, look for ways to connect those understandings to community or societal issues. Select tasks that illuminate disparities or injustices (e.g., who is impacted, who has access to resources, what historical factors are at play) and allow students to ask, “What does this mean for our community?” or “How could science help improve this situation?” Scaffold opportunities for students to brainstorm or design actions—even if preliminary—so they begin to see science as a tool for change, not just understanding.