Which side are you on? The role of attitudes in reasoning practices in student-group interactions regarding a socio-scientific issue related to climate change

ABSTRACT

While researchers have stressed the importance of engaging students in activities that enhance their reasoning practices, few have scrutinised the factors that impact the reasoning involved in such activities. We explored the role of attitudes in student-group interactions concerning a climate change-related socio-scientific issue and how those attitudes emerged from the reasoning process. We applied Martin and White’s [(2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan] appraisal framework for studying attitudes in oral language to analyse two student groups involved in a discourse as they constructed arguments supporting further petroleum exploration. The two groups displayed unique patterns of attitudes towards additional exploration: one group displayed strong, positive attitudes, while the other displayed varied attitudes, including doubt and insecurity. These more complex attitudes in the second group were important to how these students reasoned about the issue, enabling them to appreciate the complexity of the issue, as the expression of multiple perspectives and doubt opened a richer inquiry into the socio-scientific issue, enhancing the quality of their reasoning. Our findings point to the significance of considering students’ attitudes when organising activities were students’ reason about a socio-scientific issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-scientific issues
• attitudes
• reasoning

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank colleagues in the REDE-project and in the research group Challenges of Sustainability Education Research (COSER) for constructive feedback on drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethic statement

The project was ethically approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (approval 44613) by the time of data collection, which means that all students and the teacher gave their informed consent to participate in the study.

Transcript notations

[]	=	Clarifying information
?	=	Rising intonation
<text>	=	Speech delivered more slowly than usual for the speaker
(.)	=	A brief pause, usually under a second
((italics))	=	Annotation of non-verbal activity
–	=	An abrupt halt or interruption in utterance

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from The Research Council of Norway [grant number 249872], project Representation and Participation in School Science (REDE).