Victor Sampson

Personally‐Seeded Discussions to Scaffold Online Argumentation

Research shows that scientific knowledge develops through a process of decision‐making as well as discovery, and that argumentation is a genre of discourse crucial to the practice of science. Students should therefore be supported in understanding the scientific practices of dialectical and rhetorical argumentation as part of learning about scientific inquiry. This study focuses on supporting scientific argumentation in the classroom through a customized online discourse system. “Personally‐seeded discussions” support learning and collaboration through an activity structure that elicits, shares, and contrasts students’ own ideas to engage them in the discourse of science argumentation and inquiry. Students use an online interface to build principles to describe data they have collected. These principles become the seed comments for the online discussions. The software sorts students into discussion groups with students who have built different principles so that each discussion group can consider and critique multiple perspectives. This study explores the efficacy of this personally‐seeded approach based on a coding scheme developed by Erduran, Osborne, and Simon that analyzes argument structure from a Toulmin perspective. As part of this exploration, the study outlines a method for parsing personally‐seeded discussions into oppositional episodes for analysis, and discusses future directions for supporting argumentation in asynchronous online discussions.

The efficacy of student-centered instruction in supporting science learning

Puzzling Through Gravity Much of the excitement of scientific discovery seems to get lost when science is taught as facts by lectures. Granger et al. (p. 105) present a large study of outcomes comparing inquiry-based teaching with more traditional teaching methods. Over 2000 students were involved, in 125 classrooms of 4th- and 5th-graders. The classes studied space-science with a curriculum that uses models and evidence to entice students into improving their own understanding of the science. Students who were encouraged to use evidence to support their models seemed to develop improved knowledge of content. A randomized trial reveals that opportunities to support models with evidence aids understanding in grade-school students. Transforming science learning through student-centered instruction that engages students in a variety of scientific practices is central to national science-teaching reform efforts. Our study employed a large-scale, randomized-cluster experimental design to compare the effects of student-centered and teacher-centered approaches on elementary school students’ understanding of space-science concepts. Data included measures of student characteristics and learning and teacher characteristics and fidelity to the instructional approach. Results reveal that learning outcomes were higher for students enrolled in classrooms engaging in scientific practices through a student-centered approach; two moderators were identified. A statistical search for potential causal mechanisms for the observed outcomes uncovered two potential mediators: students’ understanding of models and evidence and the self-efficacy of teachers.

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.

Analyzing the quality of argumentation supported by personally-seeded discussions

Several researchers have shown that student participation in discourse paralleling that of scientific communities is critical to successful science education. This study focuses on supporting scientific argumentation in the classroom through a personally-seeded online discussion system. Students use an online interface to build principles to describe data they have collected. These principles become the seed comments for the online discussions. The software sorts students into discussion groups with students who have built different principles so that each discussion group can consider and critique multiple perspectives. We outline a methodology for (a) coding the individual comments in terms of epistemic operation, grounds, and content normativity and (b) parsing and assessing overall argumentation structure of the oppositional episodes. This study therefore contributes to the research literature both in terms of scaffolding and assessing student argumentation in online asynchronous forums.

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.

Habitat tracker: learning about scientific inquiry through digital journaling in wildlife centers

This poster presents preliminary results from an ongoing research project designed to help elementary school students learn about scientific inquiry. Florida State University, in partnership with the Tallahassee Museum (a wildlife center in Tallahassee, FL), has developed a digital journaling system that uses online and mobile technologies to help students better understand the nature of science. The projects goal is to encourage students to become active participants in the scientific inquiry process by collecting and analyzing data about natural habitats, before, during, and after visits to a wildlife center. Preliminary results show that a mobile learning application specifically designed for elementary school students can support the scientific inquiry process at wildlife centers and in the classroom, and help students master the scientific inquiry and nature of science benchmarks advocated by science education reform efforts.

Research on critique and argumentation from the technology enhanced learning in science center

Technology Enhanced Learning in Science Center (TELS) received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation to investigate approaches for improving learning and instruction in science classes for students in grades 6–12 with a focus on the role that information technology can play. The knowledge integration framework informs the design of TELS curricula in terms of supporting students in (1) eliciting ideas, (2) adding ideas, (3) developing criteria for evaluating ideas, and (4) sorting and connecting ideas based on those criteria. Critique, argument construction, and argumentation represent central TELS research foci for supporting those foci. This chapter provides an overview of that research. More specifically, this chapter synthesizes research on the role of critique in students’ experimentation skills, the manner in which students warrant ideas in their explanations and arguments, approaches for supporting students in critique and argumentation, approaches for supporting students in revising their explanations and arguments, designs to optimize dialogic argumentation, and approaches for analyzing students’ critique and argumentation.

Two Instructional Models That Teachers Can use to Promote & Support Scientific Argumentation in the Biology Classroom

ABSTRACT We describe two instructional techniques that science teachers can use to promote and support scientific argumentation inside the classroom. These techniques are designed to give students an opportunity to establish or validate a claim on the basis of reasons or to propose, support, evaluate, and refine a claim as part of a group. The description of the techniques includes two example lessons and suggestions for teachers.

Evaluating the quality of dialogical argumentation in CSCL: moving beyond an analysis of formal structure

Over the last decade, researchers have developed sophisticated online learning environments to promote argumentative discourse between students. This symposium examines some of the diverse ways researchers have attempted to examine how students engage in argumentation and to assess the effectiveness of CSCL environments in fostering productive argumentation. The papers presented as part of this symposium will focus on four different categories of analytic frameworks: (1) nature and function of contributions within the dialog, (2) nature of reasoning, (3) conceptual quality, and (4) patterns and trajectories of participant interaction. Example analytic frameworks from each category are presented in detail rich enough to illustrate their nature and structure. Synthetic discussions of each category consider the frameworks in light of the underlying theoretical perspectives on argumentation, pedagogical goals, and online environmental structures.

Metalogue: Engaging Students in Scientific and Socio-scientific Argumentation

Evagorou: In this chapter, Shirley and Ruth raise several interesting issues related to (socio-scientific issues) SSI, argumentation, and decision-making. A major question in this study was the quality of students’ arguments, and if there is a link between the nature of the evidence (e.g., scientific, environmental, financial) and the quality of the arguments. The results are not conclusive as to this point, and the authors suggest that more evidence is necessary.