December 8, 2021
SSEC Science Curriculum Developer, Mary E. (Beth) Short, authored a white paper on student sensemaking. In the paper, Short notes that students enter classrooms equipped with a rich foundation of skills and knowledge from their everyday experiences. High-quality science education builds on students’ wealth of experience in making sense of the world. In science classrooms, sensemaking is a collaborative practice that includes students sharing initial ideas with peers and identifying inconsistencies or gaps in their shared understandings about the cause of phenomena or solutions to problems (Odden and Russ 2019). While sensemaking, students are continually drawing on their existing knowledge and integrating it with new information. Therefore, the process of sensemaking in science classrooms includes building or revising explanations for phenomena or iteratively working to solve problems and answer questions. Short's white paper was shared with 26,156 district and school leaders by EdWeek. The open rate was 31.32% (average is 25-30%) and the click rate was 2.97% (average is 3%).
Read more: https://landing.carolina.com/smithsonian-students-sensemakin...