“We’re getting somewhere”: Development and implementation of a framework for the analysis of productive science discourse

Abstract

Sense‐making and argumentation are two common ways to frame student discourse. The former emphasizes the process of students coming to an understanding, the latter the logical and rhetorical structure of the product. When we investigated the discourse of two groups of preservice science teachers in an environment that fosters productive disciplinary engagement, we found that elements of both sense‐making and argumentation pervaded the discourse as the preservice teachers engaged in the scientific practice of developing an explanation of a complex phenomenon. We have developed a framework based on, but extending that of Toulmin that allowed us to capture the to‐and‐fro nature of the development of an explanation by using elements of argumentation and sense‐making as well as transactivity. Using the framework we were able to characterize almost all utterances of the 40‐min discourse of both groups. Both groups arrived at a similar point of conceptual convergence, even though the interactions that took place during the activity were of quite a different nature. We detail the affordances of our framework and contrast them with those of purely argumentation‐based frameworks.

Passive elementary student's constructed epistemic emotions and patterns of participation during small group scientific modeling

“…T A B L E 4 Coding framework for Susan's cognitive and social participation (Engle & Conant, 2002;Duschl et al, 2007) and arguments (Grimes et al, 2018) during their small group discussion 3.1 | Assertion 1: Susan did not participate and constructed epistemic frustration in Lesson 1…”

“…After identifying Susan's epistemic emotions, we coded her patterns of participation following the three cate- Grimes et al (2018) as a guide to identify claims with evidence, justification, and explanation (Table 4).…”

A thematic content analysis of rhetorical and dialectical argumentation studies in science education

“…26 (76%) of the 34 articles examined in the study are examples of rhetorical argumentation (Berland & Mc Neill, 2010;Berland & Reiser, 2009;Chang & Chui, 2008;Clark & Sampson, 2007;Dawson & Venville, 2009;Foong & Daniel, 2013;Jimenez Aleixandre et al, 2000 ;Grimes, McDonald & van Kampen, 2019;Kelly, Druker & Chen, 1998;Kolstø, 2007;Kutluca & Aydın, 2017;Liu, Liu & Lin, 2019;Mc Neill, 2011;Moon, Stanford, Cole & Towns, 2017 ;Osborne et al, 2016;Pabuçcu & Erduran, 2017;Ryu & Sandoval, 2012;Sadler & Donnely, 2006;Sadler & Fowler, 2006;Venville & Dawson, 2010;Yang & Lin, 2015;Yerrick, 2000;Weng, Lin & She, 2017;Zhu, Lee, Wang, Liu, Belur & Pallant, 2017),and 8 (24%) are examples of dialectical argumentation (Albe, 2008;Chin & Teou, 2009;Gonzalaes-Howard & McNeill, 2017;Kim & Song, 2005;Naylor, Keogh & Downing, 2007;Nielsen, 2012;Nussbaum, Sinatra & Poliquin, 2008;Yun and Kim, 2015 ).…”

“…).There are also conclusions that the use of scientific information as evidence in the argumentation of socioscientificissues can make evaluation of argumentation difficult (Nielsen, 2012), the argumentation process should not be monologic (Kutluca &. Aydın, 2017;Nielsen, 2012), the information provided to students in the argumentation process is sometimes not used correctly by students (Pabuçcu & Erduran, 2017), and Toulmin model is insufficient to analyze the argumentation process and new elements should be added to the model (Grimes et al, 2019).…”

“…As a result of the examinations, it was seen that researchers using Toulmin argumentation model accepted the limitations of this model and revised the model to show the dialectical processes they experienced (Berland & Mc Neill, 2010;Berland & Reiser, 2009;Clark &Sampson, 2007;Grimes, McDonald & van Kampen, 2019;Jimenez Aleixandre et al, 2000;Kelly et al, 1998;Mc Neill, 2011;Ryu & Sandoval, 2012). These additions may result from Toulmin model not being developed for a particular field.…”