I Am Sure There May Be a Planet There: Student articulation of uncertainty in argumentation tasks

Abstract

We investigated how students articulate uncertainty when they are engaged in structured scientific argumentation tasks where they generate, examine, and interpret data to determine the existence of exoplanets. In this study, 302 high school students completed 4 structured scientific arguments that followed a series of computer-model-based curriculum module activities simulating the radial velocity and/or the transit method. Structured scientific argumentation tasks involved claim, explanation, uncertainty rating, and uncertainty rationale. We explored (1) how students are articulating uncertainty within the various elements of the task and (2) the relationship between the way the task is presented and the way students are articulating uncertainty. We found that (1) while the majority of students did not express uncertainty in either explanation or uncertainty rationale, students who did express uncertainty in their explanations did so scientifically without being prompted explicitly, (2) students’ uncertainty ratings and rationales revealed a mix of their personal confidence and uncertainty related to science, and (3) if a task presented noisy data, students were less likely to express uncertainty in their explanations.

Keywords:

• argumentation
• model-based learning
• nature of science

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants No. 0929774 and No. 1220756. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge students and teachers who participated in this study. We also appreciate the HAS project staff at the Concord Consortium who developed the exoplanet detection simulation and the HAS module featured in this study.

Conflict of Interest

The second author has been consulting research in another Concord Consortium's project unrelated to the project being reported in this paper. The models and scientific argumentation tasks used in this paper were developed by the Concord Consortium.

Notes

1 Angle of incidence refers to the angle at which the system is situated in relation to the observer (on Earth). For example, a system that is on the same plane as our point of view will be detectable, while a system normal to that plane (at 90 degrees to our point of view) will be entirely undetectable.

2 The claim element of each task required either a yes or no answer, but these responses did not always correspond to whether or not there was a planet, depending on the wording. To make this clearer, we have recoded claim responses in Table 3 to correspond to whether or not the student is claiming there is a planet present.