Drama as a Powerful Tool to Enrich Socio-scientific Argumentation

Abstract

Socio-scientific argumentation (SSA) is increasingly being recognized as a key aspect of scientific literacy. Much of the reason for this is that this skill is crucial for helping students to become active participants in twenty-first-century democratic societies in which the construction of informed and critical views of socio-scientific issues (e.g. climate change, COVID-19 vaccination, genetic testing) plays a fundamental role. The problem is that instructors rarely give students explicit and research-based opportunities to enrich their SSA skills. Therefore, the aim of this study was to provide evidence that drama can be used as a platform to enrich argumentation in genetic testing. The data were derived from the written responses and the audio recordings of seventy-six university students (37 females and 39 males, 16–29 years old) in Colombia during a complete drama-based teaching–learning sequence (TLS) supervised by the same instructor. The outcomes suggest that the sequence can be used to enrich argumentation in genetic testing as it effectively provided participants with explicit opportunities to produce both arguments and counterarguments about the controversy whether the use of genetic tests among people should be encouraged. This study contributes to the literature on SSA in science education by demonstrating that drama is a promising tool to enhance argumentation about science-based social issues. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10763-022-10320-3.

Determination of Argumentation Quality of Science Teacher Candidates in the Context of the Human Reproductive System Subject

“…The participants approved the use of genetic tests which are produced with the help of scientific and technological knowledge on such a social issue. This result is similar to Archila et al's (2023) research findings. The researchers investigated the effect of the drama-based teaching-learning sequence method on university students' opinions about genetic testing and their research consisted of five stages.…”

Preservice Biology Teachers’ Socioscientific Argumentation: Analyzing Structural and Content Complexity in the Context of a Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination

“…Consequently, science teachers tend to use SSI as contexts to foster students' science content knowledge rather than their SSA (e.g., Ratcliffe & Millar, 2009;Tidemand & Nielsen, 2017). Despite these constraints, several studies report positives cases of incorporating SSA in science classrooms, for example, by adopting communicative (Bossér & Lindahl, 2021) or drama-based (Archila et al, 2022) teaching approaches.…”