ABSTRACT
Elicitations take stock of students’ cognitive and cultural resources, and help teachers plan for instruction. A prompt for elicitations may take the form of an open-ended question that can be answered with a range of divergent responses. There are a range of wonderful strategies for eliciting students’ ideas, and plenty of resources to help teachers do that, but this chapter focuses on the question of what students are actually eliciting their ideas about. Eliciting students’ ideas about a puzzling phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the big ideas in the science curriculum in ways that are accessible and familiar to students. This is where the teacher’s knowledge of students becomes critical, because by being familiar with both the students and the content, the teacher will be able to pick the phenomena that resonate with their students.
