Even in the context of a university science course, students make and attempt to defend unscientific claims in personal and scientific contexts. This research examined a random sample of rhetorical arguments submitted by 130 first-year students in a pre-service primary teaching program for the presence and quality of research evidence and reasoning. Students were strongly encouraged to review the evidence with an open mind before taking a stance. Arguments were analysed by identifying elements of Toulmin's Argument Pattern (Toulmin, 1958) and evaluating the quality of and relationships between these elements using SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982). For the most part, students' claims aligned with scientific consensus; for example, that climate change is almost certainly anthropogenic. However, a small number of students submitted pseudoscientific claims, such as that fluoride should not be added to the water supply. Such claims lack evidence, contradict existing evidence that comes from a strong methodological basis, or rest on weak evidence that comes from a poor methodological basis. Sometimes these claims rely on faulty reasoning or logical fallacies. Concern is not only for those students who have submitted pseudoscientific claims, but also for those students who have presented claims that reflect scientific consensus yet defend those claims with shoddy evidence or poor reasoning. If students cannot distinguish between scientific and pseudoscientific claims, evidence and reasoning, how will they make robust decisions about health, how money should be spent, and how and what they will teach their future students?
A common rationale for science education is that learning science improves decisionmaking. It is argued that students will develop a strong understanding of the ideas and nature of science, which will inform their decisions. Toward this goal, science classroom activities aim to develop students' scientific literacy, including their capacity to engage meaningfully with scientific ideas. Ideas about the nature of science are advanced through scientific inquiry, with emphasis on developing students' capacity to articulate scientific explanations for phenomena. The success of this approach for developing students' scientific literacy is demonstrated. However, evidence to support the success of this approach for students' decision-making is scant. Knowledge of, and about the nature of, science can assist individuals to evaluate claims made by others, as well as their own beliefs about a scientific issue. However, to genuinely engage in these evaluations, a disposition towards open-mindedness and a valuing of science are necessary. An individual is likely to engage with many socioscientific issues in their personal lives; that is, illstructured and open-ended issues involving social and other factors beyond the physical and natural sciences. Engaging with these issues requires developed skills of reasoning, including the abductive logic used for reasoning from evidence. Scientific inquiries alone are insufficient for developing students' decision-making processes, developing open-minded thinking, and the attitudes to science for decision-making in everyday contexts. It is difficult to assess directly an individual's decision-making. It is feasible, though, to observe how learning science affects students' performance in several domains related to decisionmaking, including, but not limited to: their knowledge of science and its nature, skills of reasoning, disposition towards actively open-minded thinking, and attitudes to science. These domains are inherent to dialogic argumentation. Like explanation, argumentation in the science classroom requires students to draw on their ideas of and about science, and reason between evidence and theory, but dialogic argumentation goes further. Dialogic argumentation, framed for tentative consensus, can motivate students to collaborate productively with others, and to engage with socioscientific issues relevant to their personal and social lives. The dialogue requires interlocutors to reason, to critique the reasoning of others, and to engage with feedback to their own reasoning. Students are encouraged to challenge their own and others' beliefs, interrogate biases, and recognise the limits of knowledge and understanding about the world. They must also consider and negotiate scientific principles and standards of evidence. This study investigated the role that dialogic argumentation in a foundation course in science can play in developing first year preservice primary teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions for decision-making. A quasi-experimental design was prepared to explo...
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