DISCUSS: Using Socioscientific Issues to Engage Students in Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning

• In Event: 77.057 - MTCC Roundtable Session 35
  In Roundtable Session: 77.057-7 - Student Focus: Science Teaching and Learning SIG Roundtable Session

Abstract

Scientific argumentation can help students develop critical thinking skills, reasoning from evidence and problem-solving skills. Unfortunately, science classes often times minimize or eliminate opportunities for argumentation because of time-constraints. To address this lack of opportunity for students to engage in argumentation and evidence-based reasoning, this study examined whether a socio-scientific curriculum that targeted 137 sixth grade student science content knowledge, academic language, argumentation, and critical thinking skills would impact students’ ability to state claims, evidence and reasoning when presented with a real world question. A pre-test and post-test was used to determine that experimental and control groups both learned the target content, but the experimental group successfully composed claims and use evidence-based reasoning while the control was not.

Authors

• Sissy S. Wong, University of Houston

• Jennifer Donze, University of Houston

• Jie Zhang, University of Houston

• Ma. Glenda Lopez Wui, University of Houston

• Jackie Eunjung Relyea, Harvard University