How Science Teachers DiALoG Classrooms: Towards a Practical and Responsive Formative Assessment of Oral Argumentation

Argument-based teaching

“…This is because of the strong relationship between science and argumentation, both aiming at evidence-based explanations of certain phenomena (Osborne, 2010). Some of the initiatives propose a structured lesson programme with concrete topics to be applied by the teachers in their respective classrooms (e.g., Howe et al, 2015;Larrain et al, 2019), while others focus on the use of argumentative language and activities by the teachers in their everyday practice (e.g., González-Howard & McNeill, 2019;Henderson et al, 2021;McNeill et al, 2016). Either in one way or another, evidence suggests that argument-based teaching in science has a significant impact on students' construction of both oral and written arguments (e.g., Chen et al, 2016), their development of more advanced argumentation reasoning structures such as counterarguments and rebuttals (e.g., Erduran et al, 2004), and the transformation of the classroom into a community of inquiry (e.g., Duschl & Osborne, 2002).…”

“…In that latter case, instead of focusing on the quality of individual arguments, which would have been impossible from a classroom management perspective, the teacher is invited to assess the overall classroom climate in terms of several factors, including student participation, spontaneous reaction to each other comments without the teacher's intervention, use of more sophisticated types of discourse such as evidencebased affirmations, use of counterarguments and rebuttals from part of the students, etc. An example of this type of teacher-based assessment is described by Henderson et al (2021).…”