Middle School Students’ Evaluations of Competing Scientific Explanations

• In Event: Poster Session 7
  In Poster Session: Exploring the Space of Science Pedagogical Practices

Abstract

This study investigates whether there are differences in the epistemological resources that sixth graders call upon when evaluating scientific explanations versus eighth graders who have studied science in the context of scientific practices for three years. Students were given five competing explanations for a given phenomenon, chose the best, and wrote evaluations of all five. Preliminary results show that eighth grade students both choose the most causally coherent explanation more often and call on the idea of Cause and Effect more often in their evaluations than sixth graders.

Author

• Brandy L.E. Buckingham, Northwestern University