The formative assessment probes in the Uncovering Student Ideas series are designed to draw out children’s ideas that will not only inform your teaching but also support their learning. Using a probe before launching into an investigation allows students to make a prediction and explain the reason for their prediction; drawing upon their prior knowledge, everyday observations of the natural world, previous classroom experiences, conversations with family and friends, or information from the media. The question posed by the probe allows children to practice “exploratory talk” in order to articulate their thoughts prior to an investigation, sort out their trial ideas, and to make their thinking visible to their peers and the teacher.

Turn and talk and think-pair-share are typical classroom routines elementary teachers use to support speaking and listening. Unless students are given explicit support in how to talk and listen with one another, these routines sometimes result in non-productive science talk. When using a formative assessment probe in a talk format to make their thinking visible, students will benefit from using a scaffold, which can eventually fade away as students become more adept at speaking and listening to each other. Teachers will also benefit by gaining more information to feed back into their instruction as they listen to students talk productively with each other.

Instructional scaffolds help break a task or routine into manageable steps that provide support for learning how to use a skill or process. Gradually, the scaffolded support is needed less and less as the learner begins to use the skill or process independently. The Talk-Listen-Restate (TLR) scaffold is used to help students articulate their thoughts and listen carefully to others. Speaking and listening is combined with restating, where a student repeats back what another student has said, restating their reasoning (Michaels, Shouse, and Schweingruber 2008). The student who first said the restatement is then given an opportunity to clarify the restatement if something was missing, unclear, or misinterpreted. Table 1 shows the steps of the TLR scaffold and the approximate time for each step when used with a formative assessment probe.

Before using the scaffold, go over each step with students. It may be helpful to prepare a wall or table chart of the steps for students to refer to as they use the TLR scaffold. For example, explain that after stating the full answer selected from the choices on the probe, the “talker” supports the answer statement with ideas that may come from observations, classroom activities, prior knowledge about the phenomenon, information from the media, everyday experiences, or evidence from data gathered from investigations. Students may use drawings if it helps support their explanation. Explain that the listener only listens during step 3 and cannot talk at anytime until the “talker” is finished, and it is time to restate. Restating means to repeat back what the talker said, not what the listening student may think about the probe. Explain that step 5 is an opportunity to make sure the listener captured what the “talker” said. Give students plenty of practice in using the scaffold, especially the restating part. It may help to give sentence starters to use with steps 3 and 4, such as I think this because _____ or So it sounds like you think _____.

The scenario below illustrates how the TLR scaffold might unfold with third graders when used as an initial elicitation to the “Magnets in Water” probe (Keeley and Tugel 2009; see Figure 1). After the teacher gives instructions for using the scaffold, students have been paired, and they have had individual time to think about the probe and write down their initial ideas, step 3 begins:

Student 1: I picked Nate. I think magnets and paper clips have to be in air. If both of them are in water, they won’t attract. I think the magnet loses something in the water. I think this because when some things fall in water, they don’t work anymore. Like if a cell phone or a computer falls in a swimming pool, it won’t work. My sister had a watch that went in the washing machine and it wouldn’t work anymore. Water does something to things that have metal in them so I think a magnet won’t work if it gets too wet. (Student 2 is carefully listening).

Student 2: So you think magnets and paper clips have to be dry to work. You think this because the magnetic stuff leaks out of the magnet in the water, and things that don’t go in water won’t work when they get wet.

Student 1: I didn’t say anything about magnets leaking. I just thought that getting it wet does something to it so it won’t work anymore. It might depend on how long it is in the water.

(Roles switch)

Student 2: I picked a different answer. I agree with Steve. I don’t think air makes a difference. Magnets will attract paper clips when both are underwater. I know this because I watched a show once where there was a submarine that had an arm come out that was a magnet. It was pulling the metal things out of a shipwreck. So I think it doesn’t matter since a magnet and paper clip in water are like what I saw on that show.

Student 1: You think magnets will work when they are in water. I heard you say you saw a show that showed a magnet on a submarine. So it must be the same about a magnet and a paper clip in water.

Student 2: Yes, that is right, and the steel parts of the ship were under water too and the magnet stuck to them.

In this scenario, both students had an opportunity to share their thinking and listen carefully to make sense of each others’ ideas, checking back to make sure they heard each other correctly. The teacher may then ask pairs to share some of the similarities and differences in their ideas with the whole class before students launch into an investigation to find out whether magnets will attract paper clips when they are in water. The scaffold provides an opportunity for students to consider a range of ideas before gathering evidence from their investigation, making sense of that evidence, and using it to revisit the probe to revise their answer as needed and construct a scientific explanation for their observation.

The TLR scaffold can be used with any type of formative assessment probe that elicits students’ initial ideas and produces a range of reasoning that may be based on evidence or may come from students’ everyday experiences or other sources. By being more structured than turn and talk or think-pair-share, it results in talk that is more productive and makes students’ thinking visible to both the students and the teacher.