Tip 1: Keep claims specific. Sentence starters that help students identify, discuss, and write claims should be specific to the learning goals for the activity and phenomenon the class is studying. 

Tip 2: Consider varied forms of evidence. Evidence sentence starters can point students towards varied experiences they’ve had. These experiences might involve data from an experiment or a text source, or they may be relevant experiences a student has had outside of class. Starters might sound like: “We read that…”, “During recess, we observed…”, or “I know this from…”

Tip 3: General connecting phrases can support reasoning. Reasoning sentence starters should be the most general and open. This should allow the widest range of student ideas to come forward. The goal is to help students connect evidence to their claims, so connecting phrases are helpful: “This evidence shows…” or “This result can be explained by…”

Tip 4: Practice with and personalize sentence starters. As with any classroom tool, it is important to practice with sentence starters and develop norms for how students may use them. For instance, if students feel confused or confined by the phrasing of some sentence starters, they can rewrite them or decide not to use them. Here are a few other ideas for practicing:

• Printing out available sentence starters, color coded by kind (Claim, Evidence, or Reasoning), can let students choose starters that feel most natural to them and move them around to construct arguments. For instance, an early use might invite students to select and sequence multiple claims to tell the science story they want to tell from an investigation, then add in evidence and reasoning pieces.
• It can be helpful to have students work in pairs or groups on a single document or poster. Students can discuss with each other using language that is natural to them before formalizing their ideas into an argument. 

Tip 5: Remind students to use available resources. If you have developed a summary chart or a driving question board, these might provide students with clues as to what can be included in their argument. Students can refer to such artifacts and remind themselves what evidence they have collected.

Sentence starters can help students construct sentences in ways that are less familiar to them, taking up academic and formal language patterns. While broadening the language available to express ideas can be helpful, it should not come at the cost of replacing students’ voices and ways of using language. 

• Broadening Language. The language students use in their day-to-day lives, including multilingual abilities, should be viewed as an asset in the science classroom. Valuing diverse languages and innovative forms of use can elicit multilingual students’ lived experiences and enrich understanding of science topics.
• Rightful Belonging. Science education is not just about preparing students to be scientists — it is also about showing how students’ lives and ideas are already part of the human endeavor of science. When using sentence starters, special attention must be paid to allowing students to practice the language of science while constructing their own ideas and understandings and maintaining authorship of those ideas.
• Shifting Worldviews. Language has a power to shape thinking, reshape worldviews, and recognize interdependence among natural processes and systems. Ask students to consider in their discussions and writing, ‘“So what? Why does this claim matter to me, to my community, or the world?”

Questions to Consider

• What opportunities do students have to consider their own ideas and the ideas of others before formalizing their ideas in writing?
• Which modalities might help students explain their thinking? Words, pictures, gestures, models, physical realia, pointing, etc. all help students communicate.
• Are the sentence starters that I am using over-scaffolded to the point of making this a fill-in-the-blank worksheet?
• What knowledge am I assuming students will use in order to complete any of these sentences?

Trying on Sentence Starters to Make Arguments in 3rd Grade. Starting students off with crafting evidence-based arguments, 3rd-grade teachers introduced students to using evidence to support claims with simple sentence starters (ex: “I think…,” “I know this because…”). They tried this on during a fossil observation activity, in which students were asked to make claims about past environments using their observations. After observing and discussing fossils in small groups, students wrote and sketched in their notebooks. In the examples below, one student included specific descriptions about why they thought one fossil was from a tooth of a sand tiger shark, and another student simply referenced their source (“I know this from the info sheet”). Next, students looked at a few notebook examples together to notice different ways their classmates used language, highlighting the usefulness of being specific about how an evidence source supports a claim. Finally, teachers invited students to add different sentence starters and language phrasing suggestions to their class chart to be used the next time they make arguments. (Dr. Carolyn Colley, Sartori Elementary)

“This fossil I think it’s a shark tooth. Not just any. I think it is a sand tiger shark tooth!! That is because it looks slender unlike the crow shark. It seems to me that it isn’t sharp enough to cut flesh. The shark either lives in the ocean or in freshwater. No matter what: IN WATER!!!”

“I think this fossil is a crinoid because its not [curved around] instead its straight like crinoid. It likely lived in the ocean, because I [experiment?] that is a crinoid and crinoid lives in the ocean. I know this because I used evidence I know and from the info sheet.”

• Learn more about supporting argumentation at the Argumentation Toolkit website, developed as part of a research and development project focusing on argumentation in middle school classrooms. 
• Check out other variations of sentence starters and related tools in these articles:
  • Eden, A. (2023). A modified claim, evidence, reasoning organizer to support writing in the science classroom. The American Biology Teacher, 85(5), 289-291.
  • McNeill, K. L., & Martin, D. M. (2011). Claims, evidence, and reasoning: Demystifying data during a unit on simple machines. Science and Children, 48(8), 52-56.
  • Shim, S-Y., Thompson, J., Richards, J., & Vaa, K. (2018). Agree/disagree T-charts: Supporting young students in scientific modeling and argumentation. Science and Children, 56(1), 39-47.