Elementary Students’ Use of Sources of Evidence to Build Arguments in Science and History

• In Event: Learning From Others: Advancing Theory and Research on Learning From Sources

Abstract

This purpose of this presentation is to compare how students use sources of evidence to construct and evaluate arguments in history and science during their last year of elementary school. Although research studies on argumentation in history and science show that students face challenges when evaluating sources of evidence to create arguments, these studies also demonstrate that students are capable with curricular and pedagogical support. We drew on sociocultural and sociocognitive approaches to learning to develop curricular units. Our methods included explicit support through cognitive, social, representational and discursive strategies to foster the development and discussion of claims and evidence in both disciplines in two 5th grade and two 6th grade urban classrooms. Science lessons involved first-hand sources of evidence created through sinking and floating experiments that the students performed in small groups. History lessons involved small groups examining an archive bin of 15 text-based primary and secondary source documents about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Students presented their findings to each other through reporting sessions in both subject matters.

The corpus of data, including videotapes and transcripts of classroom lessons, was coded for emergent practices around argumentation. 13 argumentation clusters were identified and compared across subject matters. We found that science and history shared a basic foundation of formulating and defining arguments, supporting them with evidence, and presenting and/or understanding viable alternative arguments. Unique scientific argumentation features included conceptual change and the dilemma of whether or not arguments needed to account for all the available evidence. The unique features of historical argumentation emphasize the role of imaginative and analogous reasoning and raised questions about the status of truth at the epistemological foreground of historical argumentation. Working with historical documents, written by biased human beings, led students and teachers to question the truth-value of evidence and to discuss meta-theoretical issues such as whether the truth could ever really be known. The working assumption in science, in contrast, seemed to be that developing theories from experimental evidence represented something factual. These differences may be due in part to the fact that the sinking and floating unit activities involved experimenting directly with materials and building arguments based on this evidence. In Rosa Parks, students’ evaluated the merits of the various accounts of the historical event and created an argument based on these interpretations. Had students been reading scientific reports or theories and evaluating one claim against another (versus performing their own experiments) truth claims may have been discussed in both subjects. This study is significant because it demonstrates that in both subjects and across all classes, students and teachers engaged in complex thinking that included meta-talk about the process of constructing evaluating sources of evidence in order to build robust arguments.

Authors

• Leslie R. Herrenkohl, University of Washington

• Lindsay L. Cornelius, University of Southern California