Classroom communities' adaptations of the practice of scientific argumentation

Abstract

Scientific argumentation is increasingly seen as a key inquiry practice for students in science classrooms. This is a complex practice that entails three overlapping, instructional goals: Participants articulate their understandings and work to persuade others of those understandings in order to make sense of the phenomenon under study (L. K. Berland & B. J. Reiser, 2009). This study examines the argumentative discussions that emerged in two middle school science classrooms to explore variation in how the goals of sensemaking and persuasion were taken up. Our analyses reveals that each classroom engaged with these two goals but that they did so quite differently. These differences suggest that the students in each class had overlapping but different interpretations of argumentation. In addition, comparing across the class' arguments suggests these two goals of scientific argumentation may be in tension with one another.

In Pursuit of Consensus: Disagreement and legitimization during small-group argumentation

“…In addition, the argumentative lesson needed to motivate the argumentation and enable students to investigate realistically complex situations such that the students could "directly experience the underlying rationality (reasoning) of scientific work" (Choi, Notebaert, Diaz, & Hand, 2008, p. 152). Thus, we observed groups of students as they enacted an argument-jigsaw activity (Berland & Reiser, 2011) designed to focus students on consensusbuilding around a complex data sets, in their classrooms. In the following sections we describe the activity in which the students were engaged-the context for the study-we then discuss the data sources and analytical process for this work.…”

“…Making the epistemic criteria of reliance on evidence and scientific principles explicit 3. Creating a need for students to connect claims and evidence Berland and Reiser (2011) offer a complete description of these design strategies.…”

“…In conjunction with those empirical findings, science educators have begun to coalesce around key design strategies for supporting student participation in scientific argumentation including asking questions with multiple plausible answers and providing access to the evidence necessary to choose between those answers (e.g., Berland & Reiser, 2011;Clark & Sampson, 2007;Duschl & Osborne, 2002;Hatano & Inagaki, 1991;Kuhn, 2010;Osborne, Erduran, & Simon, 2004;de Vries, Lund, & Michael, 2002). In addition to these guidelines for the types of questions and answers that are discussed in classrooms, research around those design strategies has demonstrated that in order to facilitate student argumentation, the activity structure must help students interpret the situation as one in which argumentation is a sensible and useful discourse practice (e.g., Berland & Hammer, in press;Clark & Sampson, 2007;Cohen, 1994).…”

“…Similarly, de Vries, Lund and Baker (2002) designed CONNECT-a software tool through which student dyads engaged in scientific argumentation in order to reach consensus. Berland and Reiser (2011) designed an activity structure, an "argument jigsaw", to foster similar consensus-building. In the latter activity structure, pairs of students work together to develop initial arguments.…”

Exploring the Impact of Students’ Learning Approach on Collaborative Group Modeling of Blood Circulation

“…Monitoring is important in this process required by the sense-making of the explanations discussed on a social plane. Monitoring has the persuading goal of argumentative discourse and can trigger criticism and evaluation (Berland and Reiser 2011). During this process, the quality of the models and the reasoning can be enhanced when students try to persuade others using evidence to justify their own models (Lee and Kim 2014).…”