Chapter 14 page 324
prompts are applicable only to the single topic of Andrew Jackson. To promote generalization,
cognitive prompts are typically worded more generally, such as:
- Decide what your position is.
- Support your ideas with evidence from the material you have read.
Another issue that arises with this set of prompts is whether there are enough prompts to get
students to think about a fuller range of writing strategies (recall these from Chapter 7). There are no
questions that encourage organization, major revision, minor revision, or audience consideration. In
the problems at the end of the chapter, you will see other set of cognitive prompts for a writing task
that you can compare with this set.
Diagrammatic representations. Another approach to scaffolding strategy use is to have students
use diagrams to organize their ideas. By having students write ideas into diagrams, teachers can ensure that
the students are using selected strategies. For example, teachers can encourage students to use the strategy
of comparison and contrast by asking students to fill in tables listing similarities and differences. Concept
maps, which we have learned about in earlier chapters, are one kind of diagrammatic representation.
Concept maps encourage students to organize and elaborate on information that they are learning. As
students generate the concept maps, they must connect what they have learned to other knowledge that they
have, and they must organize these ideas into a network of concepts.
My own research team has used a diagrammatic representation to help students understand how
evidence is related to explanations. In these diagrams, students use different kinds of arrows to link
evidence to different explanations that they are learning (Pluta, Buckland, Chinn, Duschl, & Duncan,
2008b). The diagram encourages students to think about how each piece of evidence is related to two or
more alternative explanations. Figure 14.4 presents an example of a diagram used by students trying to
decide how evidence related to a robbery is related to two possible explanations of what happened—one
explanation stating that the suspect (Sam Spade) committed the robbery and the other explanation that the
suspect bought a paper at the robbed store but was playing poker at the time of the robbery. Working in
pairs, students discuss whether each piece of evidence supports, strongly supports, weakly supports,
contradicts, or strongly contradicts each explanation. Because students need to decide how strongly the
evidence supports or contradicts the explanation, the students often engage in extended discussions about
just how strong or weak the evidence is. These diagrams have proven to be very effective in encouraging
rich student discussion about how evidence links to alternative explanations.
Figure 14.11 An example of an diagrammatic representation. After extended discussion, two students
working together have added the arrows shown in red.