The role of dialogic argumentation in science education for decision-making

Abstract

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...