Impact of argumentation on Lebanese students’ argumentation skills, informal reasoning and achievement in biology -

Abstract

Argumentation is commonly used to expose people’s opinions and beliefs that may conflict with the beliefs of others. According to Driver, Newton, and Osborne (2000), argumentation requires higher-order thinking skills and thus, has been integrated in the teaching learning process. Argumentation has become an important teaching method since it has the potential to enhance learning and prepare future citizens capable of making informed decisions about everyday socio-scientific issues. According to Osborne (2010), this method enhances students’ learning more than traditional teaching methods. Although some studies suggest that engaging in argumentation enhances the quality of argumentation, informal reasoning, and achievement, other studies show that no or little progress occurs. Moreover, no studies examined the effect of argumentation on informal reasoning or achievement in Lebanon. Also, the studies that examined this relation showed that few students are able to reach high level arguments. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not effective argumentation teaching strategies can scaffold student learning in a Lebanese context. It further examined how effective argumentation can enhance students’ informal reasoning and argumentation skills. This study was embedded in Design-Based-Research (DBR) that has an iterative nature and thus, allowed (after some time) the modification of certain factors in the intervention which helped better implement the study in a particular context. The study included two iterations in which during iteration two, changes were made to better implement the study. Hence, the study investigated the following research questions: (a) does engaging Lebanese Grade 8 students in argumentation enhance achievement in biology? (b) does teaching argumentation skills to Grade 8 Lebanese students enhance the level of their arguments? (c) does engaging Grade 8 Lebanese students in argumentation enhance the level of their informal reasoning skills? The s