Identifying Intellectual Humility During Engagement in Argument From Evidence in High School Life Science

• In Event: Fostering Intellectual Humility in Adolescence

Abstract

Developing a scientifically literate population may involve fostering intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility (Sharon & Baram-Tsabari, 2020). Intellectual humility (IH) involves “recognition of one’s fallibility as a knower” (Porter et al., 2021) and recent empirical work suggests that IH predicts productive responses to scientific misinformation (Koetke et al., 2021). Development of IH is not a typical component of formal science education in the US. However, the practice of arguing from evidence has gained a foothold in classrooms due to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013), which names it as one of eight practices to be addressed in science instruction. Arguing from evidence involves constructing and critiquing arguments (Henderson et al., 2015) and offers a way to investigate IH in youth. Engaging in argument by its very nature involves considering others’ point of view (Aberdein, 2020). However, there has been minimal (if any) work investigating what IH might look like in classrooms. This paper answers the question of what IH sounds like during argumentation tasks in high school science. If we can identify examples of IH in a classroom setting, we will be better able to design effective resources to promote development of this intellectual virtue.

This paper presents a re-analysis of adolescents thinking aloud while engaging in argumentation tasks about ecosystems. Think aloud interviews were conducted for a larger study to develop an instrument to measure argumentation in ecology (Author, 2015). Twenty high school biology students (Mage = 16.5) thought aloud (Ericsson & Simon, 1993) while they completed four argumentation tasks. Transcripts were segmented into “thought units” (Miles & Huberman, 1994) and a descriptive code was attached to each thought unit. Thoughts units were coded using a priori codes based on Toulmin’s (1958) Framework for informal argument and open codes to identify emerging themes (Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Adolescents were more likely to identify the argument that most closely aligned with their original argument as the most correct; participants selected the argument that matched theirs 75% of the time. Furthermore, in 63% of these cases, participants used the fact that the hypothetical argument matched their own as “evidence” that it was correct (even if it was not). There were 55 excerpts coded as instances of intellectual humility across the 20 transcripts, which were described using three codes: “Expresses uncertainty about one’s own idea/argument,” “Updates own idea/argument,” and “Supports another student’s idea/argument.” Expressions of uncertainty were most common, while support for other ideas was extremely rare. Students that considered alternative ideas were more successful on the argumentation tasks.

This paper offers examples of what IH might look like in high school science classrooms and preliminary evidence that higher IH is associated with better argumentation. Future work is needed to confirm a link between IH and argumentation and to test interventions that support IH in science classrooms. Supporting the development of IH in adolescence may be a fruitful way to develop a public that is more discerning about the scientific claims they encounter in the “post-truth” era.

Author

• Anna MacPherson, American Museum of Natural History
  Presenting Author