Stein Dankert Kolstø

Patterns in Students’ Argumentation Confronted with a Risk‐focused Socio‐scientific Issue

This paper reports a qualitative study on students’ informal reasoning on a controversial socio‐scientific issue. Twenty‐two students from four science classes in Norway were interviewed about the local construction of new power lines and the possible increased risk of childhood leukaemia. The focus in the study is on what arguments the students employ when asked about their decision‐making and the interplay between knowledge and personal values. Five different types of main arguments are identified: the relative risk argument, the precautionary argument, the uncertainty argument, the small risk argument, and the pros and cons argument. These arguments are presented through case studies, and crucial information and values are identified for each argument. The students made use of a range of both scientific and non‐scientific knowledge. The findings are discussed in relation to possible consequences for teaching models aimed at increasing students’ ability to make thoughtful decisions on socio‐scientific issues.

Learning about the Nature of Scientific Knowledge: The Imitating-Science Project

This paper reports a small-scale curriculum project aimed at teaching about the nature of science at lower secondary school. The main idea of this project is to stimulate students’ learning of science as a process by involving the students in reflections based on personal experience of an open-ended investigation. The paper describes how it is possible to include publication and argumentation of methods and results in a school experiment, as well as findings related to changes in students’ epistemological thinking. The students wrote about how researchers conduct research prior to and after the project. Analysis of these texts showed that more students included the idea of testing hypotheses in the post-study texts than in the pre-study texts. Students also expressed more awareness of what researchers might do to enhance the quality of their research. We found that students tended to use words like “facts” and “proofs” in the prestudy texts. In the post-study texts, however, more students emphasised that research findings do not represent final answers but the researcher’s argument-based conclusions.

How do laypeople evaluate the degree of certainty in a weather report? A case study of the use of the Web service yr.no

AbstractMany people depend on and use weather forecasts to plan their schedules. In so doing, ordinary people with no expertise in meteorology are frequently called upon to interpret uncertainty with respect to weather forecasts. With this in mind, this study addresses two main questions: 1) How do laypeople interpret online weather reports with respect to their degree of certainty and how is previous knowledge drawn upon in this interpretation? and 2) How do laypeople integrate information in weather reports to determine their degree of certainty? This qualitative study is based on semistructured interviews with 21 Norwegians. The results show the following: (a) only a portion of uncertainty information was used, (b) symbols were sometimes ascribed different meanings than intended, and (c) interpretations were affected by local experiences with wind direction and forecast quality. The informants’ prior knowledge was found to prevail in the event of a conflict with forecast information, and an expected ra...

Enacting Citizenship in Ordinary School Science Through Deliberative Communication

Within science education research, there is a growing focus on democratic participation. However, this research does not seem to include ideas on how deliberative communication, a central idea in critical democratic theory, might be emphasised and carried out within the typical content-focused science teaching. We explore how students’ and teachers’ ways of doing school science might, or might not, imply citizenship education as defined in Tomas Englund’s framework of deliberative communication in school settings. The students’ communication provides opportunities for them to scrutinise each other’s arguments and meet utterances with tolerance, as well as be able to form collective decisions and question authorities. As deliberative communication is one possible approach to operationalise citizenship education, our main argument is that citizenship as practice is researchable within the frame of ordinary school science. Consequently, this chapter seeks to trouble notions that dealing with citizenship in science education requires a coupling to controversial issues.