Evaluating and using evidence to support a claim and providing reasoning to demonstrate why the evidence supports a claim can be a challenging practice for students to learn. In the context of an inquiry task across a science unit, we tested an evidence-sorter tool that helps students to organize and reason with evidence to support their selected claim in a unit culminating argument essay. We found that the number of evidence-reasoning pairings that students provided on their evidence-sorter tool significantly positively predicted the number of evidence-reasoning pairs in the final essay. These results suggest that helping students make more evidence-reasoning connections in the evidence-sorter tool should lead to an increased use of reasoning in the final essay.