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Duschl, R & Osborne, J. 2002. ”Supporting and Promoting Argumentation Discourse in Science

Education” in Studies in Science Education, 38, 39-72

Ingeborg Krange

Andreas Lund

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The understanding of the growth of knowledge and its development have changed

• Theories of learning – from behavioural to a concern with the cognitive and social nature of thinking

• Theories of mind – from belief in tabula rasa to a consideration that there may be innate capacities like language syntax

• Theories of knowledge – from the notion that knowledge is cumulative to ideas that knowledge is often reconfigured, adapted and even abandoned

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These changes have led to arguments which would suggest that

• Classroom instruction need to be centred around students’ active learning and take into account research that demonstrates that students’ prior knowledge is significant factor for active learning

• That the focus on students’ work should transcend the declarative to include procedural and strategic knowledge – reason and reflect metacognitively on their own learning and the construction and evaluation of scientific knowledge

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Policy reports

• Documents that these suggestions are ignored in science classrooms. This means that they are more or less the same as 50 years ago

• The teacher is still in the centre of the educational practices and it is the teacher who initiate the discourse

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Teaching science needs

• What we know (facts)

• How we know and why we believe

• This requires a focus on– How evidence is used in science for the construction of

explanations

– Evaluate the selection of evidence and the construction of explanations

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The important role of language in learning and the design of learning environments

• Debate and argumentation around competing theories, methodologies and aims are central to doing and learning science

– This requires that students engage in practicing and using its discourse in a range of structured activities

– This will support the social construction of knowledge, exposing student thinking and enabling its critical evaluation by the teacher, the student and his/her peers

– To sum up: teaching science as a process of enquiry without the opportunity to engage in argumentation, the construction of explanations and the evaluation of evidence is to fail to represent a core component of the nature of science or to establish a site for developing student understanding

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Review of research concerning a specific type of language genre, ARGUMENTATION

• Some in the 60ties

• More serious about the role of language in science education in the 80ties (Lemke) – argumentation is a genre of discourse central to doing science

• Argumentation as theme has developed during the last 10-15 years

– Cognitive and social perspectives on the development and growth of knowledge in relation to argumentation in science classrooms

– argumentation as fundamentally dialogic and must be based on some ‘ground rules’

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What should constitute argumentation?

• Argumentation as a war that seeks to establish a winner

or

• as a social and collaborative process necessary to solve problems and advance knowledge

(Toulmin – warrants and backings used to make claims are shaped by the guiding conceptions and values of the field/community)

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What do research say about the classroom conditions that promote, nurture and sustain argumentation practices among students?

• Whole class discourse – Suitable for learning facts

– Dominated by teacher (IRE)

– This does not increase reasoning skills, doing science or learning about science

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Conditions for supporting argumentation

• Are dependent on the use of evidence in the process of building and evaluating explanations

• The construction of an explanation requires students to clarify their thinking, generate examples, to recognise the need for further information and to monitor and repair gaps in their knowledge.

• These kinds of communication among students have shown to be effective in science education

• These kinds of communications are particular for science education

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Other aspects that have been considered to play an important role on cognitive development and learning are• Prior knowledge

• Context

• Language and social processes

• Tool to help development of more sophisticated forms of scientific discourse – [how would they do this? And is it room for doing it?]

• Sufficient time to understand the central aspects

• Ground rules – audience role

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How can teachers foster and improve the quality of the argument?

• Argument oriented (warrant, claim, backings, qualifiers)?

• Content oriented?

• In this interpretation these two aspects are intertwined – language genre

– [arguments are more general and the content is more specific]

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Summing up

• The need to provide students access to plural accounts of phenomena and the evidence that could be used in an argument for one or the other account.

• Combination of multiple techniques – such as student presentations, small-group discussions, argumentation skills and discourse

• There are different alliances between cognitive and social schemas in sciences – [we need to be aware of what kinds of moves they take when they conclude – p 65 positive cognitive outcome]

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Critique

• Strong faith in the students’ ability to reflect – consider different scientific interpretations

– Where do these interpretations come from?– Is it always the rhetorically best argument that is the most valid one?– Are the argumentations focused on doing science or doing lesson? If the latter is

the case, what is a relevant argument?• Missionaries for science education and strongly normative• Little attention to the tools – talking primarily about learning environments in

relation to the pedagogical interpretation to science education• The premises for argumentation is partly problematic

– the fundamental strategies for all teachers is the creation of difference between their view and their students’ view of phenomena. For without difference, there can be no argument, and without argument, there can be no explanation