Judging the plausibility of arguments in scientific texts: a student–scientist comparison

Abstract

The ability to evaluate scientific claims and evidence is an important aspect of scientific literacy and requires various epistemic competences. Readers spontaneously validate presented information against their knowledge and beliefs but differ in their ability to strategically evaluate the soundness of informal arguments. The present research investigated how students of psychology, compared to scientists working in psychology, evaluate informal arguments. Using a think-aloud procedure, we identified the specific strategies students and scientists apply when judging the plausibility of arguments and classifying common argumentation fallacies. Results indicate that students, compared to scientists, have difficulties forming these judgements and base them on intuition and opinion rather than the internal consistency of arguments. Our findings are discussed using the mental model theory framework. Although introductory students validate scientific information against their knowledge and beliefs, their judgements are often erroneous, in part because their use of strategy is immature. Implications for systematic trainings of epistemic competences are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 14 April 2015; Accepted 27 November 2015KEYWORDS Informal argument evaluation; epistemic competences; mental model theory; think-aloud procedure; competences in higher education Arguments can affect our daily lives in many ways, whether we think of politicians trying to persuade us to vote for a particular party, a newspaper article providing a certain perspective on a societal issue, or taking decisions about which kind of career we would like to pursue. In scientific discourse, arguments also play a central role, because they link theoretical claims to supporting empirical evidence. Students entering university are confronted with scientific literature that presents different and at times conflicting theories backed up by more or less compelling evidence. The ability to evaluate This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. THINKING & REASONING, 2016 VOL. 22, NO. 2, 221À249 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2015 scientific claims and evidence is an important aspect of scientific literacy and requires various epistemic competences (Britt, Richter, & Rouet, 2014). The present research investigated how students of psychology, compared to scientists working in psychology, evaluate arguments and which strategies they use to judge their plausibility. Successful readers possess a broad number of general processing strategies that they use in a flexible way, depending on the processing goal (Wyatt et al., 1993). Although argumentation skills are generally not formally taught in higher education, we expect scie...

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