Abstract
This paper makes the case for argument in science education drawing on a range of research efforts in the field. The specific research reported here took place over two years between 1999 and 2001 in junior high schools in the greater London area. The research was conducted in two phases. In phase 1, working with a group of 12 science teachers, the main emphasis was to develop sets of materials and strategies to support argumentation in the classroom, and to support and assess teachers’ development with teaching argumentation. In phase 2 of the project, the focus of this paper, teachers taught the experimental groups a minimum of nine lessons that involved socio-scientific or scientific argumentation. In addition, these teachers taught similar lessons to a comparison group at the beginning and end of the year. The focus of this research was to assess the progression in student capabilities with argumentation. For this purpose, data were collected from 33 lessons by videotaping two groups of four students in each class engaging in argumentation. Using a framework for evaluating the nature of the discourse and its quality developed from Toulmin’s argument pattern, the findings show that there was an improvement in the quality of students’ argumentation.
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Osborne, J. (2005). The Role of Argument in Science Education. In: Boersma, K., Goedhart, M., de Jong, O., Eijkelhof, H. (eds) Research and the Quality of Science Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3673-6_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3673-6_29
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