Lateral Reading-Model-Evidence Link Diagrams (LR-MEL) Project

The purpose of our project is to promote students' civic and scientific evaluations of sources and alternative claims when confronted with controversial and/or complex socioscientific issues in the Earth and environmental sciences. We do this by integrating English Language Arts (ELA) and social studies classrooms—focused on source evaluation—with science classrooms—focused on evaluating connections between lines of evidence and alternative explanatory claims. We are developing, implementing, and testing complementary Lateral Reading (LR) and Model-Evidence Link (MEL) scaffolds that include instructional materials and methods in both social studies and science classrooms. Issues students explore range from climate change and extreme weather to freshwater availability and food security along with many others.

Project Overview

The Lateral Reading-Model-Evidence Link Diagrams (LR-MEL) project is investigating how deeper evaluations might promote changes in students' epistemic judgments, including source trustworthiness, and claim plausibility, toward a more civically-minded and scientific stance. We are also developing and implementing three-day summer institutes and follow-on professional development to help middle and high school ELA, social studies, and science teacher teams use LR (in ELA and social studies) and MEL (in science) scaffolds to facilitate students' critical-analytic thinking, evidence-based reasoning, and core disciplinary knowledge.

Lateral Reading - Source Evaluation


Model-Evidence Link - Evaluating Connections Between Lines of Evidence and Alternative Explanatory Claims


Project Support

The Lateral Reading-Model-Evidence Link Diagrams project is supported in part by the NSF under Grant Nos. DRL-2201012, DRL-2201013, DRL-2201015, DRL-2201016, DRL-2201017, and DRL-2201018. Previous support came from Grant Nos. DRL-2027376, DRL-1721041, and DRL-1316057. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the NSF's views.


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