There are basically two types of evidence: material and physical. Material evidence is generally considered anything that can be manufactured: paint, fibers, or glass, etc. These bits of evidence can be visible or invisible. In many cases, evidence must be examined with the use of microscopes or other scientific instruments to detect and collect valuable data or information. Material evidence is also commonly known as trace evidence.

Become a detective to solve the case of the smelly backpack! Act out the clues and draw conclusions to solve the mystery.

When Detective Bentley cannot figure out why his backpack is smelly, he retraces the events in his day to find clues. Taking on the role of detectives, the viewers act out the events of Bentley’s day and use textual clues to solve the case.

Learning Objective:
Draw conclusions from the facts presented in text and support those assertions with textual evidence.

How It’s Done
Samples That May be Collected at a Crime Scene
A wide variety of physical evidence can be collected at a scene that is deemed valuable (“probative”) for collection and investigation:

-biological evidence (e.g., blood, body fluids, hair and other tissues)
-latent print evidence (e.g., fingerprints, palm prints, foot prints)
-footwear and tire track evidence
-trace evidence (e.g., fibers, soil, vegetation, glass fragments)
-digital evidence (e.g., cell phone records, Internet logs, email messages)
-tool and tool mark evidence
-drug evidence
-firearm evidence

Also included:
-Who Examines Crime Scenes
-How a Crime Scene Investigation is Conducted
-How and Where Tests on the Evidence are Conducted

Crime Scene features fictional crime cases in a unique combination of interactive fiction and gaming.

Each week, Yoknapatawpha County detectives post evidence from the current case.

You are invited to participate in the investigation by reviewing the presented evidence and offering your theories and questions to the detectives and other web sleuths.

Each person in the world has a set of fingerprints unique to them! Even though every print is different, they can be categorized into one of three general types:
-loops (found in 65% of the population)
-whorls (found in 35% of the population)
-arches (found in 5% of the population)

Analyzing fingerprints can be a tricky business, especially without computers to help. After categorizing a print as a loop, whorl, or arch, look for these individual features:
-core: in a loop fingerprint, this is the center of the loop. 
-delta: in loop and whorl patterns, this is an area where ridges meet from three directions. (There is usually one delta on a loop and two or more on a whorl.
-ridge end: notice where individual ridges come to an end. 
-bifurcation: notice where a ridge divides into two ridges (like a fork in a road)
-island: notice any short ridges cut off from others. 
-crossover: notice where any ridges appear to cross over each other.

Try your hand at fingerprint analysis! Two different fingerprints have been found at a crime scene. Compare them to the fingerprints of the 4 suspects on this website.

The following document suggests ways that students can "write more" or add more to their writing in a meaningful way by adding: descriptionproof/evidencevocabularlyvoice(s)explanationInportance/Persausion 

Project Zero at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education has created a collection of Core Thinking Routines as part of their Visible Thinking Project. Teachers can view the entire collection on the Project Zero website (https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines#CoreThinkingRoutines), where each routine is described in detail (e.g., purpose, application, launch) in both English and Spanish.

These routines encourage students to be intentional thinkers.

What do they know or notice?
What is their perspective or position on an issue or idea?
How can they support their position or thinking?
What do they wonder? What are they confused about?
How has their thinking changed? What caused that change?

Students build a world of their own by answering curriculum aligned questions covering thousands of skill strands. Reading, writing, rhyming and phonetics are included.

Educators get free full access. Parents can work collaboratively with their child's teacher for access or purchase home memberships.

The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The Innocence Project's mission is to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.

Learn how to write an expository essay with opinion, reason and evidence while creating your very own comic strip!
With superhero Captain Opinion and her sidekicks, Reason and Evidence, the viewer goes on a fun adventure into the world of opinions and the importance of supporting them with lots of reasons and evidence.
Learning Objective:
Have students write an expository essay that establishes a central idea in a topic sentence; includes supporting sentences with simple facts, details, and explanations; and contains a concluding statement.

The key to any successful criminal investigation and prosecution is the quality of evidence obtained at the crime scene. The more evidence collected, the greater the likelihood of a conviction. Crime scene investigators are highly skilled in the investigation and collection of evidence, and they often have to be on the lookout for numerous types of evidence. Here are some of the basic evidence types found at a crime scene.

Students use DNA profiling to determine who robbed a bank. After they learn how the FBI's Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is used to match crime scene DNA with tissue sample DNA, students use CODIS principles and sample DNA fragments to determine which of three suspects matches evidence obtain at a crime location. They communicate their results as if they were biomedical engineers reporting to a police crime scene investigation.