Argumentation in Science Education: Helping Students Understand the Nature of Scientific Argumentation So They Can Meet the New Science Standards

A Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC 2012) and subsequent Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve Inc. 2013) will substantially influence the teaching and learning of science in the United States. The Vramewor, for example, calls for students to learn about several practices related to scientific argumentation. These practices--arguing from evidence (practice #6) and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information (practice #8)--are embedded throughout the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Many teachers, as a result, need to re-focus their curriculum and methods to teach these practices. This article will help teachers understand the nature of scientific argumentation so they can help students reach the new benchmarks. It will also explain challenges students face when they participate in scientific argumentation and will list resources teachers can use to help students learn from and about scientific argumentation in the classroom. What counts as an argument in science? In scientific argumentation, individuals attempt to support, challenge, or refine a claim on the basis of evidence (Norris, Philips, and Osborne 2007). Claims include conjectures, conclusions, explanations, models, or an answer to a research question. Scientists often rely on evidence to support their claims. To generate a compelling argument, however, scientists must also convince others that their evidence is relevant and of high quality. Scientists, as a result, spend a great deal of time assessing, critiquing, and defending the evidence used to support or challenge claims when they engage in scientific argumentation. Students must also learn how to construct an evidence-based argument and evaluate the evidence presented by others. We developed an argument framework (Figure 2, p. 32) to help students understand what counts as evidence in science and how to construct and evaluate a scientific argument. In this framework, an argument consists of a claim, evidence, and a justification of the evidence. The claim, as described earlier, is a conjecture, conclusion, explanation, principle, or some other answer to a research question. Evidence is data or findings from studies. Note that in this framework, data and evidence have different meanings. Scientists collect data or gather findings from other studies then transform the data or findings into evidence. To do this, they must first analyze the data or findings (e.g., by making comparisons between groups, looking for trends over time, identifying relationships between variables, or synthesizing available literature), and then they provide an interpretation of their analysis. Finally, in this framework, they justify the evidence, explaining its importance by making the specific principle, concept, or underlying assumption that guided the analysis of the data (or findings) and the interpretation of their analysis explicit. To clarify, let's examine the argument made by James Watson and Francis Crick in one of the most important scientific papers in history. In their groundbreaking article, "A structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" (1953), they set out to describe a "radically different structure" (p. 737) for the DNA molecule. Their claim was complex, describing not only the helical chains of DNA and the directions they run in relation to each other but also how the purine and pyrimidine bases hold the two chains together: FIGURE 1 The effect of weights on pendulum speed. # of weights # of swings (in 10 seconds) None 0 2 3 4 6 5 6 6 7 7 7 8 6 Student claim: The optimal number of weights was 6 or 7 because with 8 weights, the pendulum's speed slowed by about 1 swing per section. This proves that the pendulums swing faster depending on the amount of weight. …