ABSTRACT:Within the increasing body of research that examines students' reasoning on socioscientific issues, we consider in particular student reasoning concerning acute, open-ended questions that bring out the complexities and uncertainties embedded in illstructured problems. In this paper, we propose a socioscientific sustainability reasoning (S 3 R) model to analyze students' reasoning exchanges on environmental socially acute questions (ESAQs). The paper describes the development of an epistemological analysis of how sustainability perspectives can be integrated into socioscientific reasoning, which emphasizes the need for S 3 R to be both grounded in context and collective. We argue the complexity of ESAQs requires a consideration of multiple dimensions that form the basis of our S 3 R analysis model: problematization, interactions, knowledge, uncertainties, values, and governance. For each dimension, in the model we have identified indicators of four levels of complexity. We investigated the usefulness of the model in identifying improvements in reasoning that flow from cross-national web-based exchanges between groups of French and Australian students, concerning a local and a global ESAQ. The S 3 R model successfully captured the nature of reasoning about socioscientific sustainability issues, with the collective negotiation of multiple forms of knowledge as a key characteristic

Scientific expertise and outcomes often give rise to controversy. An educational response that equips students to take part in socioscientific discussions is the teaching of Socially Acute Questions (SAQs). Students engaging with SAQs need to engage with socio scientific reasoning, which involves reasoning with evidence from a variety of fields other than science, including values, economics, local and global perspectives, governance issues, and a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This paper describes research in which tertiary students from France and Australia engaging with sustainability SAQs reasoned responses in wikis. In previous analyses (Morin et al., 2013), we have developed a six‐dimensional framework of socioscientific sustainability reasoning (S3R). In this paper, we describe the development of an interactional reasoning framework that captures the quality of reasoning in the online discussions that led to specific improvement in S3R. The framework draws on and extends the discourse framework of Mercer, and Habermas’ three worlds of validity of arguments to identify first that a particular category—integrated exploratory talk—is associated with improvement in S3R, and that this almost exclusively involves exchanges drawing on personal and social evidence claims as well as technical. We explore the implications for supporting collaborative decision making in socio scientific issues, for democratic participation and for post normal science education. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 54: 825–851, 2017

Scientific expertise and outcomes often give rise to controversy. An educational response that equips students to take part in such discussions is the teaching of socially acute questions (SAQs). With SAQs, the understanding of uncertainty, risk and how knowledge is developed is central. This study explores the way in which students from different disciplines and different continents are brought together via a digital platform to explore SAQs about environmental issues (a green algae outbreak linked to release of fertilisers along the coast of Brittany; the construction of a desalination plant near Melbourne to produce freshwater; and changes in meat consumption on a global scale, with regard to population projections in 2050). We have developed frameworks for looking at the quality of the collective reasoning and at the nature of students' interactions, so that we can analyse the organisation of the learning communities and the building of collegial expertise. The results show that interdisciplinary discussions, especially on an international scale, foster the understanding of complex situations. In this paper, we discuss the modalities of one didactic scenario to enhance critical thinking and collaborative work, and to provide space for learners to support argumentation.

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