Mediating Argumentation in Environmental Science

• In Event: Agency, Argumentation, and the Advancement of Causal Reasoning

Abstract

Argumentation, like any practice, is learned in the context of its use. When taught in real-world settings or realistic simulations, students can learn the role of evidence in persuasion, the need to consider multiple viewpoints, modify positions and create counter-arguments in response. In Environmental Science, students role-playing a town council can use evidence of impacts on economy, environmental, or culture to argue for or against siting industry near their town. In our project-based AP Environmental Science course, projects provide reasons for learning disciplinary concepts and practices and opportunities to use them to accomplish real work (Krajcik & Blumenfeld, 2006; Parker et al., 2013).

Difficulties arise, however, when discipline-based goals conflict with schooling goals. Seeking to complete a school task with minimal effort, students may divide labor without synthesizing its results, seek “right” (or sufficient) answers, or wait to be told what to do. Students need guidance to learn argumentation, but sufficiently scaffolding argumentation without reducing it to a set of blanks to be filled is difficult. Teachers need ways to track the development of arguments on the fly, difficult when students are working in small groups to develop different arguments. It is challenging to “see” student thinking or critique strategies when teachers must divide time among several groups. Students with little disciplinary knowledge may have difficulty monitoring their own progress.

Theoretical Framework: Using Engle and Conant’s (2002) productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) framework, this becomes a problem of balancing tensions between content problematization and resources, and between student authority to address those problems and accountability to each other and to disciplinary norms. But these disciplinary dimensions are in tension with school-world concerns (Jurow, 2005; Roth, 2011). We used a PDE lens to guide design of material tools. Taking tool-mediated activity as the unit of analysis (Wertsch, 1994), we redesigned to better balance PDE and school-world concerns.

Objectives and Mode of Inquiry: In a multi-year design-based research project, design principles for material tools were developed that adequately scaffold disciplinary practice and support formative assessment, while maintaining students’ authority to create arguments balanced with accountability to disciplinary norms and practices and tools tested and optimized. The presentation will focus on the resulting design principles and provide illustrative video examples of implementation of the Argument Tool.

Methods: Data sources were all tool-mediated activity in two units of a year-long PBL Advanced Placement Environmental Science (PBL-APES) course. Two to three student teams and their teachers were videorecorded as they used the tools. Video was transcribed and analyzed to discern the nature of student engagement (disciplinary vs schoolworld) and the extent to which tools provided appropriate balance between PDE context dimensions.

Results and implications: We illustrate with the case of one design, test, revise, and re-test cycle for the Argument Tool. Our analysis shows how the two versions differently mediated student and teacher activity, and the impacts of those differences on student engagement and learning. Implications of findings for teaching and learning argumentation will be discussed.

Authors

• Susan B. Nolen, University of Washington - Seattle

• Alexandra Goodell, University of Washington - Seattle

• Lia Wetzstein, University of Washington