Organising a culture of argumentation in elementary science

ABSTRACT

Most of the research on argumentation in science education has documented the myriad flaws in students’ argumentation, and the difficulties teachers have organising productive arguments in the classroom. We apply a sociocultural framework to argue that productive argumentation emerges from a classroom culture in which its practice meaningfully serves classroom goals. We present a case study using interaction analysis to contrast two elementary teachers’ efforts to organise productive scientific argumentation in their classrooms. One teacher used discourse moves to orient students to each other’s contributions in ways the other did not, reflecting differences in underlying aims for collective versus individual sense-making. This analysis shows that connecting discourse practices specifically to a goal of collective sense-making promotes productive argumentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Argumentation
• discourse
• interaction analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DRL award #0733233) and from the Spencer Foundation. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors only, and do not represent the official views and opinions of the sponsors. We thank the teachers and students of the UCLA Lab School who participated in this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

William A. Sandoval http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1667-6163

Sihan Xiao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0067-4414

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 0733233] and the Spencer Foundation [grant number 201300056].