Shirly Avargil

Supporting Teachers to Attend to Generalisation in Science Classroom Argumentation.

In scientific arguments, claims must have meaning that extends beyond the immediate circumstances of an investigation. That is, claims must be generalised in some way. Therefore, teachers facilitating classroom argumentation must be prepared to support students’ efforts to construct or criticise generalised claims. However, widely used argumentation support tools, for instance, the claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) framework, tend not to address generalisation. Accordingly, teachers using these kinds of tools may not be prepared to help their students negotiate issues of generalisation in arguments. We investigated this possibility in a study of professional development activities of 18 middle school teachers using CER. We compared the teachers’ approach to generalisation when using a published version of CER to their approach when using an alternate form of CER that increased support for generalisation. In several different sessions, the teachers: (1) responded to survey questions when using CER, (2) critiqued student arguments, (3) used both CER and alternate CER to construct arguments, and (4) discussed the experience of using CER and alternate CER. When using the standard CER, the teachers did not explicitly attend to generalisation in student arguments or in their own arguments. With alternate CER, the teachers generalised their own arguments, and they acknowledged the need for generalisation in student arguments. We concluded that teachers using frameworks for supporting scientific argumentation could benefit from more explicit support for generalisation than CER provides. More broadly, we concluded that generalisation deserves increased attention as a pedagogical challenge within classroom scientific argumentation.

Students’ Metacognition and Metacognitive Strategies in Science Education

Over the last 15 years, educators and policy makers have argued metacognition is an important, even crucial, component in teaching, learning, and assessing meaningful understanding in science. Therefore, they have recommended that learning and applying metacognitive strategies become part of science curriculum starting as early as kindergarten, through middle and high school, and continuing at the college and university levels. In this chapter, we identify how the construct of metacognition was used in studies of assessment of students’ learning outcomes in science education, focusing on students’ (a) metacognitive strategies, (b) self-regulated learning, and (c) metacognition training for fostering students’ scientific thinking. Our review relates to metacognition, assessment, and science education as documented by organizations such as National Research Council (NRC) and archived in three leading journals. The review included about 300 publications, most of which were published during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The studies described in these papers investigated learning processes of students of all ages, from elementary school to higher education. We describe (a) the aspects of metacognition these studies involved, (b) whether the studies investigated metacognition in general or specific aspects of it, such as knowledge or regulation of cognition, (c) the results regarding students’ learning processes, and (d) the tool(s) that served to assess students’ metacognitive skills. Analyzing this review, we have identified a gap between what researchers strive to achieve and what can actually be found in the literature. This review enables researchers to determine whether, to what extent, and in what ways metacognition and assessment in science education have been implemented in science courses and studied in this context. Finally, we discuss the features of an ideal metacognitive-based pedagogical intervention and assessment tool, and what aspects of metacognition in science education warrant further research.

Developing Science Education Research Literacy among Secondary in-Service Teachers

Teachers’ understanding of science and science teaching influences their actions in the classroom, which eventually influences students’ conceptual understanding of science (Anderson, 2015; Schroeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, & Lee, 2007; Sadler, Sonnert, Coyle, Cook-Smith, & Miller, 2013) and students’ attitudes toward science (Christidou, 2011; Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003).

Promoting Metacognitive Skills in the Context of Chemistry Education

The first decade of the 21st Century was characterized by reforms in science education in general and chemistry in particular. Scientific literacy and thinking skills continue to be increasingly important goals of science education reforms. These goals can be achieved via learning science in context (Gilbert, 2006), learning scientific concepts and processes through real-world problems, casestudies, or adapted scientific articles (Avargil, Herscovitz, & Dori, 2012; Yarden, 2009).