Evidence-based terms in social studies

by glennw on December 17, 2013

As we move into a social studies world that is asking kids to collect evidence, organize evidence, create products, and communicate results, writing skills are becoming more and more important.

But for the last ten years or so, at least in the state of Kansas, we’ve asked kids to focus instead on memorizing content. So now when we’re asking our middle school and high school students to not just write more but to use evidence while proving assertions, we get a lot of blank stares.

My suggestion?

Steal a practice used by a lot of elementary teachers and start training your secondary kids to use evidence-based terms while writing.

Evidence-based terms are simple phrases that support the use of, well . . . evidence. So if we ask kids to look a couple of primary source documents and develop a thesis from their analysis, they have some scaffolding to help them do that.

Examples of evidence-based terms?

For example
The author stated
Because
On page
In paragraph

A quick Google image search provides a slew of great posters from elementary classrooms:

You might even want to create your own poster and hang in your room with sample sentences from a variety of different sources including multimedia. You should also model for your students with a “read aloud” and demonstrate the use of evidence-based terms before turning them loose on a set of documents.

The writer of this document is Lieutenant John Barker, an officer in the British army who was in charge of troops at the Battle of Lexington. The soldiers must have been cold because the second line of the text says “we began our march by wading through a very long ford up to our middles.” The second line of the text says is an evidence-based term. He states that “they fired one or two shots.” He states is an evidence-based term I can use to suggest that American colonists fired first in the battle.

One teacher used an Audi car commercial she found on YouTube to help kids practice using evidence. Is the father of the girl in the ad really an alien? Prove or disprove using evidence and evidence-based terms to answer the question.

Of course, kids can then go on to address a variety of more discipline-specific questions. Like this list of “un-Googleable” questions:

What really happened in Boston on March 5, 1770?
Was dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima the humane or inhumane thing to do?
What is the best form of government?
Were African Americans really free following the US Civil War?
What is the best balance between state and federal power?
What does a “More Perfect” union really mean?
Is it ever okay to violate the Bill of Rights?
What is the solution to the dropping water table in Western Kansas?
Should the local county commission allow energy companies to drill fracking wells within county boundaries?
How much influence does the environment have on historical events?
What name should be given to the federal land contested by General Custer’s 7th Calvary and the combined forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in June 1876?