Article Supporting use of evidence in argumentation through practice in argumentation and reflection in the context of SOCRATES learning environment Iordanou, Kalypso and Constantinou, Costas Available at http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/13117/ Iordanou, Kalypso ORCID: 0000-0001-5930-9393 and Constantinou, Costas (2015) Supporting use of evidence in argumentation through practice in argumentation and reflection in the context of SOCRATES learning environment. Science Education, 99 (2). pp. 282-311. ISSN 0036-8326 It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sce.21152 For more information about UCLan’s research in this area go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/researchgroups/ and search for <name of research Group>. For information about Research generally at UCLan please go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/ All outputs in CLoK are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including Copyright law. Copyright, IPR and Moral Rights for the works on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the policies page. CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk Running head: SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION Supporting Use of Evidence in Argumentation through Practice in Argumentation and Reflection in the context of SOCRATES Learning Environment aKalypso Iordanou and bCostas P. Constantinou aUniversity of Central Lancashire, Cyprus bUniversity of Cyprus, Cyprus Corresponding Author: Kalypso Iordanou, Email: [email protected] University of Central Lancashire, Cyprus 12-14 University Avenue, Pyla, 7080 Larnaka, Cyprus 2 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION Abstract The aim of this study was to examine how students used evidence in argumentation while they engaged in argumentive and reflective activities in the context of a designed learning environment. A web-based learning environment, SOCRATES, was developed, which included a rich data base on the topic of Climate Change. Sixteen 11th graders, working with a partner, engaged in electronic argumentive dialogs with classmates who held an opposing view on the topic and in some evidence-focused reflective activities, based on transcriptions of their dialogs. Another sixteen 11th graders, who studied the data base in the learning environment for the same amount of time as experimental-condition students but did not engage in an argumentive discourse activity, served as a comparison condition. Students who engaged in an evidence- focused dialogic intervention increased the use of evidence in their dialogs, used more evidence that functioned to weaken opponents‘ claims and used more accurate evidence. Significant gains in evidence use and in meta-level communication about evidence were observed after students engaged in reflective activities. We frame our discussion of these findings in terms of their implications for promoting use of evidence in argumentation, and in relation to the development of epistemological understanding in science. 3 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION Engagement in argument from evidence is one of the fundamental objectives of science education from kindergarten through grade 12 (NGSS Lead States, 2013). There is broad consensus on the need to move away from practices that support the mere transmission of facts for assimilation by students, to teaching and learning practices that promote scientific thinking. Argumentation lies at the heart of scientific thinking (Kuhn, 2010; Kuhn, Iordanou, Pease, & Wirkala, 2008). Judging scientific theories and offering alternative views for interpreting data are fundamental skills for scientific thinking. The importance of developing argumentation has been identified both by science education researchers (Duschl, 2008; Erduran & Jimenéz-Aleixandre, 2008) and policy makers (NGSS Lead States, 2013). A fundamental element of skilled scientific argumentation is evidence. Evidence is considered an essential component of both strong individual argument (Toulmin, 1958) and skilled dialogic argument, namely argumentation. In dialogic argument at a minimum one must recognize an opposition between two assertions that, on surface appearance at least, both are not correct. Evidence must then be related to each of the assertions, and, ideally, if the argument is to move toward resolution, this evidence needs to be weighed in an integrative evaluation of the relative merits of the opposing assertions. (Kuhn, 1991, p. 12) Despite its importance, research has shown that students struggle with scientific argumentation (Jimenez-Aleixandre, Rodriguez, & Duschl, 2000; Kelly & Takao, 2002; Kolstø et al., 2006). Little is known about how we can support students in developing the ability to engage in scientific argumentation, particularly their ability to employ evidence to support their claims and critiques they might offer to an opponent‘s claims. The present study sought to examine how students used evidence in argumentation while they were engaging in argumentive 4 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION and reflective activities in the context of a web-based learning environment. Another group of high school students who studied the same information as experimental-condition students but did not engage in argumentive and reflective activities served as a comparison condition. Background Research on argumentation has been flourishing lately both inside and outside the science education domain, with researchers using quite different perspectives to approach argumentation (Erduran & Jiménez-Aleixandre, 2008). In the work presented here, we share the view that the development of scientific argumentation is multi-faceted (Duschl, 2008; Kuhn, 2010). In particular, we adopt Kuhn‘s (2010) model of argumentation, according to which argumentation has both procedural and meta-level components that regulate its use. The procedural components involve the cognitive skills that support the execution of argumentation, while the meta-level components involve both meta-strategic understanding of the goals of argumentation and more general epistemological understanding, that is, understanding of what is scientific knowledge and how one knows. Research offers cumulative evidence showing that students struggle with scientific argumentation (Jimenez-Aleixandre et al., 2000; Kelly & Takao, 2002; Kolstø et al., 2006). We believe that underlying these struggles are insufficient developments at the meta-level understanding, meta-strategic or epistemological, that support argumentation. According to Walton (1989) argumentation has two goals. The first is to secure commitments from the opponent that can be used to support one‘s own argument. The second is to undermine the opponent‘s position by identifying and challenging weaknesses in the opponent‘s argument. Without approaching argumentation through Walton‘s lenses, evaluating and critiquing others‘ 5 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION ideas would appear meaningless. Berland and Reiser (2011) showed that students who were asked to argue with a persuasive goal engaged in evaluation and critique of others‘ ideas more frequently than students who were asked to argue with a goal of sense-making, providing evidence for a relationship between students‘ goals in argumentation and the employment of specific argumentative moves. According to Berland and Reiser, unless students genuinely took on the goal of trying to persuade others, who did not already know what they knew—why their claim is supported by evidence—there is little motivation for them to go beyond presenting the story they thought correct. (2009, p. 48) Furthermore, previous research has shown that students who haven‘t developed a constructive epistemological understanding do not engage in skilled argumentation (Mason & Scirica, 2006; Nussbaum, Sinatra, & Poliquin, 2008). For example, the work of Nussbaum, Sinatra, and Poliquin (2008) showed that students who haven‘t developed a constructive epistemological understanding interacted less critically when engaged in argumentation than students who had done so. Various approaches have been developed to help students learn how to participate in scientific argumentation with mixed results (Osborne, Erduran & Simon, 2004; Zohar & Nemet, 2002). Some efforts to support argumentation focused on scaffolding students‘ understanding of the structure of a ―good‖ argument based on Toulmin‘s argumentation model, with the objective to make explicit the importance of making claims that can be justified with scientific evidence (Erduran, Simon, & Osborne, 2004; Krajcik, & Marx, 2006; McNeill, Lizotte, Sampson & Clark, 2009; Sandoval & Reiser, 2004; Zohar & Nemet, 2002). These efforts have shown that scaffolds can help students construct written scientific explanations (McNeil et al., 2006; Sampson & Clark, 2009), produce individual written arguments (Zohar & Nemet, 2002) and develop 6 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION conceptual understanding on a particular topic (Bell & Linn, 2000; McNeil, Pimentel., & Strauss, 2013; Zohar & Nemet, 2002). Yet, the modest gains of argumentation-supported instruction (Osborne, Erduran & Simon, 2004; Zohar & Nemet, 2002) point to the challenge of supporting the development of scientific argumentation and to the need for further research in order to gain a better understanding of how to support students in their development of the ability to engage in skilled argumentation. Other efforts to support argumentation have focused on offering professional development to teachers (Osborne, Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, & Richardson, 2013) and studying teachers‘ practices in order to gain an understanding of what kind of practices support scientific argumentation (McNeill, Pimentela, & Strauss, 2013; Ryu & Sandoval, 2012). For example, McNeill, Pimentela, and Strauss (2013) observed teachers while using an ecology curriculum and found that teachers who spent a larger percentage of time on group work and offered students the opportunity to engage in argumentation instead of attending lectures had greater success in supporting the development of students‘ understanding of specific science concepts and their ability to apply these concepts when constructing written arguments. Similarly, Ryu and Sandoval (2012), in observing the classroom of an ―exceptional‖ teacher over an academic year, found that engagement in group work along with scaffolding offered by the teacher, in the form of reflective questions, promoted students‘ ability to use evidence and offer justification in written arguments. Yet, the work of Osborne et al. (2013) showed that relying solely on teachers, without any particular curriculum, is not always a successful means to promote students‘ argumentation. In their study, Osborne and his colleagues offered a 5-day professional training focused on encouraging teachers to engage students in argumentation. Then the trained teachers supported their colleagues in using argumentative activities in their teaching 7 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION practice. Pre- and post-intervention evaluations showed that students whose teachers participated in the intervention did not exhibit any considerable improvements in their argumentation skills. Furthermore, the work of McNeil (2009) showed that even when teachers received a specific curriculum to support students in writing scientific arguments, this was not a sufficient condition for supporting students‘ scientific argumentation. McNeil (2009) showed that there was great variability in the way that teachers used a particular curriculum, which resulted in variability in the subsequent student gains in terms of their ability to write scientific arguments to explain phenomena. The findings of research examining teachers as facilitators for supporting students‘ scientific argumentation show that offering teachers pedagogical guidelines that encourage them to use argumentation or even providing teachers with a specific curriculum is not always a sufficient condition to promote students‘ scientific argumentation (McNeil et al., 2013; Osborne et al., 2013). Teachers‘ beliefs and views about argumentation play a determining role in whether and how they support students in their development scientific argumentation. Besides supporting teacher development of an appreciation of the value of having students engaged in argumentation, the development of a technology-enhanced curriculum that will be more student- centered and relies less on teachers for providing scaffolding might be a promising way for supporting students in developing scientific argumentation. In the present study, we examine whether a student-centered curriculum involving engagement in a series of dialogs with peers holding an opposing position on a socio-scientific topic along with reflective activities on the dialogs produced, in the context of a web-based learning environment, can support scientific argumentation. We extend previous work that has focused on scaffolding students‘ understanding of the structure of argument as a product by focusing on the process of argument construction, that is argumentation, to promote skilled 8 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION argumentation. Our method is based on the view that the two forms of argument—individual and dialogic—are intrinsically connected (Billig, 1987). Individual argument, like dialogic argument, involves the presentation of one‘s own position along with evidence in support of own position, but also presentation of an opposing position, along with evidence supporting the opposing position, and an implicit weighing process to establish the superiority of one‘s own position. Hence, individual argument encompasses an implicit dialogic argument. We share the view that dialogic argumentation is a promising pathway for the development of scientific argumentation, because it provides the ―missing interlocutor‖ (Graff, 2003) that is lacking in the individual argument and makes the goal of persuasion meaningful. The presence of real audience that needs to be convinced is a facilitating factor for students to develop an understanding of the need to provide justification and evidence in their arguments, instead of reporting their self-evident, ―right‖ claims (Berland & Reiser, 2009). Another benefit of dialogic argumentation is that it makes thinking visible and this visibility provides a ―powerful mediation or formative assessment opportunity‖ (Duschl, 2008). Our method is also based on the view that skilled argumentation is developed through practice in argumentation (Berland & Reiser, 2009, 2011; Iordanou, 2010; Ryu & Sandoval, 2012; Sandoval, 2005). Our approach of practice is based on the claim underlying micro-genetic research (Kuhn, 1995) that dense exercise of existing strategies over a period of time is a promising condition for change. Previous work has shown that engagement and practice in dialogic argumentation is a promising method for supporting the development of scientific argumentation (Iordanou, 2010; McNeill, 2009). The work of Iordanou (2010) showed that sixth graders who engaged in dialogic argumentation with classmates who shared an opposing position on the topic of dinosaurs‘ extinction as well as in some reflective activities based on transcriptions of their dialogs, shifted 9 SUPPORTING USE OF EVIDENCE IN ARGUMENTATION their attention from presenting one‘s own position to critiquing opposing position, through counterarguments, in dialogic argumentation. Besides developments at the procedural level, developments at the meta-level have been reported. In particular, the work of Kuhn, Goh, Iordanou and Shaenfield (2008) showed that participants who engaged in dialogic argumentation over an extended period of time showed significant gains in meta-level communications about the discourse, reflecting at least implicit understanding of its goals as well as the strategic moves that constituted the discourse. In addition, gains in students‘ epistemological understanding have also been reported as a result of participating in argumentation (Iordanou, 2010; Ryu & Sandoval, 2012). In particular, Ryu and Sandoval (2012) found that students who participated in sustained argumentation offered explicit justifications regarding the fit between evidence and claims when asked to evaluate arguments. The present work examines how students use evidence over time when they engage in an evidence-focused intervention based on engagement and practice in argumentive dialogic activities and in some reflective activities on a socio-scientific topic. Meta-level awareness was facilitated by conducting the dialogs via instant messaging software, which made available a transcript of the dialog subsequently used in additional reflective activities. Arguing on the computer has the benefit of providing an immediately available, permanent record of the discourse for participants to reflect on, in contrast to the conditions of real-time verbal discourse, where the contents of each contribution to the dialog immediately disappear as soon as they are spoken. The intervention method used in the work presented here is modeled on the method of engagement and practice in argumentation using instant-messaging (IM) computer software as the medium of discourse, following the successful use of this method in supporting the development of students‘ skill in producing counterarguments and rebuttals when arguing on a