Reasons vs Evidence

One thing that I am really trying to get the students to understand this week is the difference between reasons and evidence. When someone is making a claim, that claim needs to be supported with evidence and reasons. Sometimes in our writing I will find evidence but no reasons or reasons but no evidence.

To show the students the difference we looked at a blog post I found where another writing teacher was explaining how she helps students and teachers understand the difference. I love the simplicity of her explanation. Reasons answer the question why and evidence answers the questions how and when.

The students then thought about some claims that we might have about Donovan. The claims the students came up with were great but in both classes we concentrated on the claim that all Donovan students should get iPads at school. The groups got together and started to think about reasons to support that claim. Each time they came up with a reason they had to make sure that it answered the question why. Finally the groups came up with evidence to support their evidence making sure that the evidence answered the question how or when.

Today in class to reinforce this we looked at what we call a smack-down claim from Time for Kids. In a smack-down claim there are two authors arguing a point, hence the name smack-down. This smack-down claim was about whether or not tropical fish should be sold in pet stores.

While the students looked at both sides of the argument, they put one color post-it note on the claim. Then using another color post-it note they found all the reasons. The last thing the groups had to do was look for evidence. Only one of the claims in the article had any evidence. The groups had one more discussion about which claim was better structured (not which claim they agreed with). All the groups were able to tell me the argument that had a claim, then some reasons, and supplied evidence was the better claim.

We are going to keep thinking about claims, reasons, and evidence. Right now the students are keeping a gigantic list of Arguments in the World. Some lists have grown to three pages long. All these ideas will help us as we get closer and closer to deciding our final claim.

Hope you are having a great week.