Teaching and Learning Scientific Writing: Explanation and Argumentation as Interrelated Social Practices

• In Event: 18.072 - Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: 18.072-10 - Understanding Science Learning

Abstract

Science educators have considered the differences between “scientific explanation” and “scientific argumentation.” As an extension, we offer an alternative model that integrates and complements the relationship between the explanation and argumentation as related social practices manifested in discourse apprenticeships. Based on what we observed in a particular course titled “scientific writing” in a STEM high school, we suggest that as social/communicative practices, explanation and argumentation can be understood as practices with a reciprocal, networked, sequential, or layered relationship with one another. During our classroom observations and during our contextualized analyses of student writing, students offered many explanations for what they observed but as tentative claims that needed to be reconsidered within an evidence-based scientific argument.

Authors

• George E. Newell, The Ohio State University

• Eileen Buescher, The Ohio State University

• Andria Stammen, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Dorothy Sutton, Metro Early College High School