Supporting and evaluating students’ written scientific explanations

We report on a study of students’ written scientific explanations (“narratives”) in the context of a general education physics course using the NextGen PET curriculum. Students wrote explanations several times during the course, given prompts with varying levels of scaffolding. We present a rubric for evaluating these written explanation for organization, completeness and correctness, a method for tracking these, preliminary data, and a discussion of the effectiveness of specific interventions.