Formative Assessment

What do your students’ think happens to water drops when they disappear from the outside of a cup?

Look for evidence of students’ ideas in their annotated drawings on the notebook page What happens to drops of water?

As you interpret annotated drawings, try to gain insight into each student’s idea about evaporation.

Typically students this age may think that water that evaporates (disappears)

• has dried up and is nothing — it doesn’t exist
• has soaked into the surface material, e.g., plastic or paper towel
• has gone into the air and will become a cloud
• has transformed into drops too small to see that are part of air

Students who use the term “evaporation” may hold different ideas about what the word means.

Next steps (in feedback or discussion) might be to ask students to clarify anything you don’t fully understand, to provide more details or elaborate explanations, to explain what “evaporation” means without using the term.