“Evaluate What I Was Taught, Not What You Expected Me to Know”: Evaluating Students’ Arguments Based on Science Teachers’ Adaptations to Toulmin’s Argument Pattern

Reasoning on Controversial Science Issues in Science Education and Science Communication

“…Argumentation is the communicative part of reasoning [22] and is addressed more and more by science curricula around the world [33]. Argumentation in science is an essential skill, not only for scientists and science students but also for citizens, to enable them to make informed decisions on (socio-)scientific issues in everyday life [33].…”

“…Aside from differences among these frameworks focusing either on content [28], structure [74], or the epistemological quality [75] of arguments, all of these frameworks rely on Toulmin's Argument Pattern (TAP) [32]. The TAP builds a general structure of arguments (Figure 2) and a foundation to assess them [33]. [32,33]) and its application to a complex argument concerning the CSI of SARS-CoV-2.…”

“…The TAP builds a general structure of arguments (Figure 2) and a foundation to assess them [33]. [32,33]) and its application to a complex argument concerning the CSI of SARS-CoV-2.…”

“…Different approaches to assessing argumentation have been used in science education [31]. Toulmin's Argument Pattern (TAP) [32] in particular has been applied in various ways [33]. However, TAP is predominantly used to assess the quality of students' arguments [34] and focuses on an argument's structure [35].…”

“…Furthermore, most research on informal reasoning and argumentation in the context of SSI and CSI focuses on either school [27][28][29]33,35] or university students [16,36,37], but similar analytical approaches to argumentations used by the public [18] could provide insights into controversial debates on scientific issues in everyday life. This research aims to describe different kinds of justifications used when people reason informally on selected CSI based on their attitude, using a fine-grained category system.…”