Joi Phelps Walker

Argument-Driven Inquiry as a Way to Help Undergraduate Students Write to Learn by Learning to Write in Chemistry.

This exploratory study examined how undergraduate students’ ability to write in science changed over time as they completed a series of laboratory activities designed using a new instructional model called argument-driven inquiry. The study was conducted in a single section of an undergraduate general chemistry lab course offered at a large two-year community college located in the southeast USA. The intervention took place over a 15-week semester and consisted of six laboratory activities. During each laboratory activity, the undergraduates wrote investigation reports, participated in a double-blind group peer review of the reports, and revised their reports based on the reviews. The reports written during each laboratory activity were used to examine changes in the students’ writing skills over time and to identify aspects of scientific writing that were the most difficult for the undergraduates in this context. The reviews produced by the students during each report were used to evaluate how well undergraduates engage in the peer-review process. The results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reports and reviews indicate that the participants made significant improvements in their ability to write in science and were able to evaluate the quality of their peers’ writing with a relatively high degree of accuracy, but they also struggled with several aspects of scientific writing. The conclusions and implications of the study include recommendations for helping undergraduate students learn to write by writing to learn in science and new directions for future research.

The Development and Validation of the Assessment of Scientific Argumentation in the Classroom (ASAC) Observation Protocol: A Tool for Evaluating How Students Participate in Scientific Argumentation

This chapter describes the development and initial validation of a new instrument that researchers can use to assess how students participate in scientific argumentation. This instrument, which is called the Assessment of Scientific Argumentation in the Classroom (ASAC) Observation Protocol, includes 19 items that target the conceptual or cognitive, epistemological, and social aspects of scientific argumentation. The chapter includes an overview of the methodological and theoretical frameworks that were employed to develop and validate the instrument, the steps used in the development and validation process, and the final version of the instrument. Our findings indicate the ASAC is a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the quality or nature of the scientific argumentation that takes place between students within a classroom setting. This instrument will therefore enable researchers or teachers to examine how students learn to participate in scientific argumentation over time, to document learning gains in response to an intervention, or to compare strategies for promoting or supporting engagement in scientific argumentation in a more emergent or in situ context.