Teaching Strategies for Developing Students’ Argumentation Skills About Socioscientific Issues in High School Genetics

Abstract

An outcome of science education is that young people have the understandings and skills to participate in public debate and make informed decisions about science issues that influence their lives.Toulmin's argumentation skills are emerging as an effective strategy to enhance the quality of evidence based decision making in science classrooms. In this case study, an Australian science teacher participated in a one-on one professional learning session on argumentation before explicitly teaching argumentation skills to two year 10 classes studying genetics. Over two lessons, the teacher used whole class discussion and writing frames of two socioscientific issues. An analysis of classroom observation field notes, audiotaped lesson transcripts, writing frames and student interviews indicate that the teacher promoted quality argumentation by encouraging debate and listening, defining and exemplifying argument, prompting for justification of evidence, playing devil's advocate and encouraging reflection.The implications for future professional learning and research are that the use of whole class discussion and writing frames of socioscientific issues in context promote argumentation skills.

Students’ Positioning in the Classroom: a Study of Teacher-Student Interactions in a Socioscientific Issue Context

“…While there are a number of detailed analyses of teacher-student interactions in the science classroom, concerned with the teaching of science content (Chin 2006;Lemke 1990;Mortimer and Scott 2003;van Zee and Minstrell 1997;Wellington and Osborne 2001) and argumentation skills (Dawson and Venville 2008;Mork 2005;Simon et al 2006), only a few studies deal with moment-to-moment teacher-student interactions regarding SSI. Levinson (2004) performed a classroom study on student-student and teacher-student interactions on ethical issues related to biotechnology.…”

Does the Discussion of Socio‐Scientific Issues require a Paradigm Shift in Science Teachers' Thinking?

“…However, related research on the promotion of argumentation in science and teaching using controversial issues in science (Cross & Price, 1996;Dawson & Venville, 2010;Simon, Erduran, & Osborne, 2006) does provide useful insights into the place of argumentation and disagreement within discussion. In fact, most of the literature on discussion in science pertains to the content complexities of the socio-scientific issues but interestingly fails to deal with the issue of whether the discussion was open or teacher dominated.…”

Verbal Aggressiveness and Argumentativeness in Physical Education: Perceptions of Teachers and Students in Qualitative and Quantitative Exploration

“…An important benefit of argumentativeness is to consolidate existing knowledge and create new knowledge to students, based on the ideas of social environment (Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000). The inclusion of argumentative activities during the teaching process is essential for generating argumentativeness in a school class (Dawson & Venville, 2010;Knight & McNeill, 2011;Osborne, Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, & Richardson 2013;Simon, Erduran, & Osborne, 2006;Zembal-Saul, Munford, Crawford, Friedrichsen, & Land 2002). …”