Science and Language Teachers’ Assessment of Upper Secondary Students’ Socioscientific Argumentation

Abstract

Researchers and policy-makers have recognized the importance of including and promoting socioscientific argumentation in science education worldwide. The Swedish curriculum focuses more than ever on socioscientific issues (SSI) as well. However, teaching socioscientific argumentation is not an easy task for science teachers and one of the more distinguished difficulties is the assessment of students' performance. In this study, we investigate and compare how science and Swedish language teachers, participating in an SSI-driven project, assessed students' written argumentation about global warming. Swedish language teachers have a long history of teaching and assessing argumentation and therefore it was of interest to identify possible gaps between the two groups of teachers' assessment practices. The results showed that the science teachers focused on students' content knowledge within their subjects, whereas the Swedish language teachers included students' abilities to select and use content knowledge from reliable reference resources, the structure of the argumentation and the form of language used. Since the Swedish language teachers' assessment correlated more with previous research about quality in socioscientific argumentation, we suggest that a closer co-operation between the two groups could be beneficial in terms of enhancing the quality of assessment. Moreover, SSI teaching and learning as well as Int J of Sci and Math Educ assessment of socioscientific argumentation ought to be included in teacher training programs for both pre-and in-service science teachers.

Promoting undergraduates’ awareness of the importance of thinking critically about false or inaccurate scientific information presented in news articles

“…In science teaching and learning, engaging in argumentation implies the critical evaluation of scientific claims (Archila 2012(Archila , 2016. Christenson, Gericke, and Chang Rundgren (2017) consider that there are two main types of argumentation that should be promoted in science education: (1) argumentation on scientific issues and (2) argumentation on socio-scientific issues. For these authors, critical thinking is expected in both cases.…”

Critical elements in teacher collaboration to bring about change in bringing an English language focus to science teaching

“…Within language and literacy-based work, science teachers tend to focus on improving students' science content knowledge (Christenson, Gericke, & Chang Rundgren, 2017). By working together as a team, Mark and Dianne were able to construct a plan that included tasks to increase not only students' science content knowledge but also to support their students to achieve the linguistic goal they had set.…”

Didactic modeling of complex sustainability issues in chemistry education.

“…Elevers argumentation och beslutsfattande i debatter och samtal om hållbarhetsfrågor studeras också (t.ex. Christenson, Gericke & Chang Rundgren, 2017;Kolstø, 2006;Sadler & Zeidler, 2005). Andra artiklar har en mer teoretisk ingång och diskuterar olika modeller för arbete med hållbarhetsfrågor i kemiämnet (Burmeister, Rauch & Eilks, 2012).…”