Styles of Scientific Reasoning: A Cultural Rationale for Science Education?

Abstract

In this paper, we contend that what to teach about scientific reasoning has been bedeviled by a lack of clarity about the construct. Drawing on the insights emerging from a cognitive history of science, we argue for a conception of scientific reasoning based on six “styles of scientific reasoning.” Each “style” requires its own specific ontological and procedural entities, and invokes its own epistemic values and constructs. Consequently, learning science requires the development of not just content knowledge but, in addition, procedural knowledge, and epistemic knowledge. Previous attempts to develop a coherent account of scientific reasoning have neglected the significance of either procedural knowledge, epistemic knowledge, or both. In contrast, “styles of reasoning” do recognize the need for all three elements of domain‐specific knowledge, and the complexity and situated nature of scientific practice. Most importantly, “styles of reasoning” offer science education a means of valorizing the intellectual and cultural contribution that the sciences have made to contemporary thought, an argument that is sorely missing from common rationales for science education. Second, the construct of “styles of reasoning” offers a more coherent conceptual schema for the construct of scientific reasoning—one of the major goals of any education in the sciences.

Epistemic Practices of Engineering for Education

“…Solving engineering problems and constructing design solutions require various types of knowledge and reasoning (e.g., Kind & Osborne, ). Engineering often relies on propositional knowledge from other fields, such as science and mathematics.…”

Evaluating Scientific Reasoning Ability: The Design and Validation of an Assessment With a Focus on Reasoning and the Use of Evidence

“…Thus, one of the primary tasks of science education is to cultivate students into good reasoners and become scientific literate (Lawson, 2004). K-12 science educators have also made great efforts to foster students' scientific thinking and reasoning through their engagement in familiar phenomena in daily life contexts (Kind & Osborne, 2017;van der Graaf et al, 2019). To cultivate student reasoning ability in and for science learning, many studies have investigated the nature of reasoning (Driver et al, 1994) and its development via teaching practices (Lawson, 2004;Zimmerman, 2000;.…”

A response to Saleh et al.: The wrong call to action

“…The authors note that we do not discuss constraints of the styles of reasoning framework nor identify its tradeoffs. Our enthusiasm for styles of reasoning (Kind & Osborne, ; Osborne, Rafanelli, & Kind, ) is based in a view that there are no tradeoffs or constraints when compared to the CCCs which, as we point out, have no scholarly foundation. Rather, we see them as explaining the diversity to be found within the sciences, elegantly capturing the forms of reasoning, and helping to identify the intellectual achievement that the sciences represent––none of which the CCCs do.…”