The value of argumentation in science education has become internationally recognised and has been the subject of many research studies in recent years. Successful introduction of argumentation activities in learning contexts involves extending teaching goals beyond the understanding of facts and concepts, to include an emphasis on cognitive and metacognitive processes, epistemic criteria and reasoning. The authors focus on the difficulties inherent in shifting a tradition of teaching from one dominated by authoritative exposition to one that is more dialogic, involving (...) small-group discussion based on tasks that stimulate argumentation. The paper focuses on how argumentation activities have been designed in school science. Examples of classroom dialogue where teachers adopt the frameworks/plans are analysed to show how argumentation processes are scaffolded. The analysis shows that several layers of interpretation are needed and these layers need to be aligned for successful implementation. (shrink)

This study aims to explore students’ argumentation and decision-making relating to an authentic socioscientific issue —the problem of environmental toxins in fish from the Baltic Sea. A multi-disciplinary instructional module, designed in order to develop students’ skills to argue about complex SSI, was successfully tested. Seven science majors in the final year of their upper secondary studies participated in this study. Their argumentation and decision-making processes were followed closely, and data were collected during multiple stages of the instructional module: group (...) discussions were audio recorded, the participants wrote reports on their decision making, and postexercise interviews were conducted with individual students. The analysis focused on the skill of evaluation demonstrated by the students during the exercise and the relationships between the knowledge, values, and experiences that they used in their argumentation. Even though all of the students had access to the same information and agreed on the factual aspects of the issue, they came to different decisions. All of the students took counter-arguments and the limitations of their claims into account and were able to extend their claims where appropriate. However, their decisions differed depending on their background knowledge, values, and experiences. The implication to SSI teaching and learning is discussed. (shrink)

The relationship between teaching and argumentation is becoming a crucial issue in the field of education and, in particular, science education. Teaching has been analyzed as a dialogue aimed at persuading the interlocutors, introducing a conceptual change that needs to be grounded on the audience’s background knowledge. This paper addresses this issue from a perspective of argumentation studies. Our claim is that argumentation schemes, namely abstract patterns of argument, can be an instrument for reconstructing the tacit premises in students’ argumentative (...) reasoning and retrieving the background beliefs that are the basis of their arguments. On this perspective, the process of premise reconstruction is followed by a heuristic reasoning process aimed at discovering the students’ previous intuitions that can explain the premises and concepts that are left unexpressed in their arguments. The theoretical insights advanced in this paper are illustrated through selected examples taken from activities concerning predictive claims on scientific issues. (shrink)

The study explored the changes in pre-service science teachers’ understanding of the nature of science and their opinions about the nature of science, science teaching and argumentation after their participation in explicit nature of science and socioscientific argumentation processes. The participants were 56 third-grade pre-service science teachers studying in a state university in Turkey. The treatment group comprised 27 participants, and there were 29 participants in the comparison group. The comparison group participants were involved in a student-centred science-teaching process, and (...) the participants of the treatment group were involved in explicit NOS and socioscientific argumentation processes. In the study, which lasted a total of 11 weeks, a NOS-as-argumentation questionnaire was administered to all the participants to determine their understanding of NOS at the beginning and end of the data collection process, and six random participants of the treatment group participated in semi-structured interview questions in order to further understand their views regarding NOS, science teaching and argumentation. Qualitative and quantitative data analysis revealed that the explicit NOS and socioscientific argumentation processes had a significant effect on pre-service science teachers’ NOS understandings. Furthermore, NOS, argumentation and science teaching views of the participants in the treatment group showed a positive change. The results of this study are discussed in light of the related literature, and suggestions are made within the context of contribution to science-teaching literature, improvement of education quality and education of pre-service teachers. (shrink)

Perspective taking is a critical yet tangled construct that is used to describe a range of psychological processes and that is applied interchangeably with related constructs. The resulting ambiguity is particularly vexing in science education, where although perspective taking is recognized as critical to informed citizens’ ability to negotiate scientifically related societal issues, or socioscientific issues via socioscientific reasoning, the precise nature of perspective taking remains elusive. To operationalize perspective taking, a theoretical conceptual analysis was employed and used to position (...) perspective taking within the context of SSR. The resulting, more precise construct identified as socioscientific perspective taking requires engagement with others or their circumstances, an etic/emic shift in one’s viewpoint, and a moral context guided by conscience. (shrink)

We report our efforts to assess the skill of contemplating and evaluating argumentation. An adaptive forced-choice instrument was developed and administered to 6th grade students, 7th grade students who had participated in a year-long intervention that successfully strengthened their argumentation production skills, and expert arguers. The instrument was sensitive enough to detect differences in skill level across these groups. Despite their gains in production skill, however, 7th graders showed only modest superiority over the untrained 6th graders and performance well below (...) that of experts. Meta-level demands involved in evaluation but not present in production, we propose, may make evaluation more difficult. (shrink)

Philosophers deny a proposal for actions can be deduced from arguments for or against the proposal because they may be incompatible. Nevertheless, people in general, and politicians especially, make decisions and present arguments they believe are convincing. We studied politicians who made decisions in complex situations. They spoke about possible actions, their consequences, the probabilities of these consequences and their evaluations, but rarely indicated why their arguments led to their choice. We hypothesized implicit argumentation rules involved and checked whether they (...) predicted those choices. We found seven implicit informal logic rules involved. We also found a random sample of people made the same choices based on the same arguments, suggesting basic warrants by which people argue about decisions. (shrink)

Researchers in science education have converged on the view that argumentation can be an effective intervention for promoting knowledge construction in science classrooms. However, the impact of such interventions may be mediated by individuals’ task goals while arguing. In argumentative discourse, one can distinguish two overlapping but distinct kinds of activity: dispute and deliberation. In dispute the goal is to defend a conclusion by undermining alternatives, whereas in deliberation the goal is to arrive at a conclusion by contrasting alternatives. In (...) this study, we examine the impact of these discourse goals on both content learning and argument quality in science. (shrink)

In the academic community, predatory publishers are exploiting academic integrity and the open access publishing model. Academicians receive numerous spam e-mail messages inviting article submissions each day which deceive authors by promising fast review and publication. The content of these emails present arguments in a way to appear as legitimate and valid to grab the attention of authors. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to advance insights into the arguments deployed by fake journals in their attempt to convey specific (...) indexicalities of identity and truthfulness. As a result of thematic analysis of 50 email messages from such journals, this research drew on two main themes-explicit and implicit arguments and their most frequent subcategories which were formal lexicon/grammar and fast peer- reviewed process. These arguments were, further, mapped on to Toulmin’s Model of Argumentation to find out more about the strength of the information used to support their claim. Utilizing Toulmin’s model, the findings highlighted the fact that there were instances of discursive deviations or “hidden rebuttals” that revealed the predatory journals’ ingenuity. (shrink)

Scientific reasoning is particularly pertinent to science education since it is closely related to the content and methodologies of science and contributes to scientific literacy. Much of the research in science education investigates the appropriate framework and teaching methods and tools needed to promote students’ ability to reason and evaluate in a scientific way. This paper aims to contribute to an extended understanding of the nature and pedagogical importance of model-based reasoning and to exemplify how using computer simulations can support (...) students’ model-based reasoning. We provide first a background for both scientific reasoning and computer simulations, based on the relevant philosophical views and the related educational discussion. This background suggests that the model-based framework provides an epistemologically valid and pedagogically appropriate basis for teaching scientific reasoning and for helping students develop sounder reasoning and decision-taking abilities and explains how using computer simulations can foster these abilities. We then provide some examples illustrating the use of computer simulations to support model-based reasoning and evaluation activities in the classroom. The examples reflect the procedure and criteria for evaluating models in science and demonstrate the educational advantages of their application in classroom reasoning activities. (shrink)

Argumentation, and the production of scientific arguments are critical elements of inquiry that are necessary for helping students become scientifically literate through engaging them in constructing and critiquing ideas. This case study employed a mixed methods research design to examine the development in 5th grade students’ practices of oral and written argumentation from one unit to another over 16 weeks utilizing the science writing heuristic approach. Data sources included five rounds of whole-class discussion focused on group presentations of arguments that (...) occurred over eleven class periods; students’ group writings; interviews with six target students and the teacher; and the researcher’s field notes. The results revealed five salient trends in students’ development of oral and written argumentative practices over time: Students came to use more critique components as they participated in more rounds of whole-class discussion focused on group presentations of arguments; by challenging each other’s arguments, students came to focus on the coherence of the argument and the quality of evidence; students came to use evidence to defend, support, and reject arguments; the quality of students’ writing continuously improved over time; and students connected oral argument skills to written argument skills as they had opportunities to revise their writing after debating and developed awareness of the usefulness of critique from peers. Given the development in oral argumentative practices and the quality of written arguments over time, this study indicates that students’ development of oral and written argumentative practices is positively related to each other. This study suggests that argumentative practices should be framed through both a social and epistemic understanding of argument-utilizing talk and writing as vehicles to create norms of these complex practices. (shrink)

Seventy-two Internet documents promoting creationism, intelligent design, or evolution were selected for analysis. The primary goal of each of the 72 documents was to present arguments for creationism, I.D., or evolution. We first identified all arguments in these documents. Each argument was then coded in terms of both argument type and argument topic. We then provided a quantitative summary of each argument type and topic for each of the three positions. Three clear patterns were revealed by the data. First, websites (...) promoting evolution were characterized by a narrow focus on appeals to empirical evidence, whereas websites promoting creationism and I.D. were quite heterogeneous in regards to argument type. Second, websites promoting evolution relied primarily on a small number of empirical examples, while websites promoting creationism and I.D. used a far greater range of arguments. Finally, websites promoting evolution were narrowly focused on the topic of descent with modification. In contrast, websites promoting creationism tackled a broad range of topics, while websites promoting I.D. were narrowly focused on the issue of the existence of God. The current study provides a quantitative summary of a systematic content analysis of argument type and topic across a large number of frequently accessed websites dealing with origins. The analysis we have used may prove fruitful in identifying and understanding argumentation trends in scientific writing and pseudo-scientific writing. (shrink)

This study analyzed the argumentative writing behavior of Iranian graduate learners of English as Foreign Language in their English essays. Further, the correlations between the use of argument elements and overall writing quality as well as soundness of produced arguments were investigated. To this end, 150 essays were analyzed. The sample essays were found to be predominantly deductive in terms of rhetorical pattern. Moreover, they mainly utilized ‘data’ and ‘claim’ most frequently with secondary elements of argument as the least produced (...) elements. Overall writing quality co-varied significantly positively with the uses of claims, data, counterargument claims, counterargument data, rebuttal claims, and rebuttal data. Essays rated high in terms of overall writing quality were further rated for soundness and relevance of the arguments. The results demonstrate that even for advanced language learners good surface structure cannot necessarily guarantee well thought-out logical structure. The pedagogical implications for writing instruction and research are discussed. (shrink)

Twitter is an instrument used not only for sharing public or personal information, but also for persuading the audience. While specific platforms and software have been developed for analyzing macro-analytical data, and specific studies have focused on the linguistic dimension of the tweets, the argumentative dimension of the latter is unexplored to this date. This paper intends to propose a method grounded on the tools advanced in argumentation theory for capturing, coding, and assessing the different argumentative dimensions of the messages (...) posted on Twitter, focusing on the types of argument communicated, the quality of their premises, and the fallacies committed – including the use of unshared presuppositions and emotive words. This method is applied to a corpus of 843 tweets published by the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mr. Matteo Salvini, from the date of his appointment to the beginning of his campaign for the European elections. The quantitative data provide general indications for detecting the strategies that characterize the argumentative profile of Salvini, which are then analyzed qualitatively. (shrink)

The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remains ill-defined and not systematically investigated. This paper addresses this problem by building on the four main dimensions of argument quality resulting from the definition of argument and the literature in (...) classroom discourse: dialogicity, accountability, relevance, and textuality (DART). We use and develop the insights from the literature in education and argumentation by integrating the frameworks that capture both the textual and the argumentative nature of argumentative texts. This theoretical background will be used to propose a method for translating the DART dimensions into specific and clear proxies and evaluation criteria. (shrink)