Fostering Students’ Decision-Making Competencies

Abstract

In the ever-changing landscape of educational practice and policy, educators oftentimes find it difficult to obtain adequate training and resources. This places a unique burden on education researchers to develop both content materials as well as professional development programs. The adoption and implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation led to a renewed emphasis on writing and literacy strategies throughout the curriculum, including the sciences. Also, continual underperforming on national and international benchmarks (NAEP, PISA, TIMSS) has led to significant efforts in this country in the past few years to revitalize and improve the quality of student science instruction and scientific literacy. The latter reflects the need to address the broad challenges of modern society on the general public and our students alike within the science classroom and “entails being able to read with understanding articles about science in the popular press.” However, while a clear working definition of the term remains elusive and transient, various efforts have been made to address individual aspects of scientific literacy. One facet is the ability to distinguish between and utilize different aspects of argumentation such as physical, societal, and political criteria for decision-making, which is also reflected within the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In this paper we introduce an example of a physics content-based approach to further students’ competency in argumentation- based decision-making.