Changes in grade 7 learners’ NOS understandings and argumentation skills after engaging in reflective discussions following alternative information evaluation in the context of socio-scientific controversial issues

Abstract

This study investigated the changes in Grade 7 learners’ NOS understandings and argumentation skills after engaging in reflective discussions following alternative information evaluation in the context of socio-scientific controversial issues. Specifically, this research study addressed the following questions: (1) How do grade 7 learners’ NOS understandings and argumentation skills change after engaging in reflective discussions following alternative information evaluation in the context of socio-scientific controversial issues? (2) How are alternative information evaluation and argumentation skills related after engaging in reflective discussions from the perspective of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA)? Participants in this study were sixteen seventh grade students in a K-12 coeducational Lebanese private school. This study used a qualitative research design. The participants were administered the Perspectives on Scientific Epistemology (POSE) questionnaire and an argumentation questionnaire adopted from Abd-El Khalick (2002) and Khishfe (2014), respectively, as pre- and posttests. The participants engaged in explicit instruction about information evaluation criteria (currency and accuracy) and argumentation components (claim, evidence, and counterargument). They evaluated information about alternative views regarding four controversial social issues (water fluoridation, climate change, electromagnetic wave pollution, and animal testing) using Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagrams, and engaged in reflective discussions which were designed based on the categories of the FRA framework. FRA is a comprehensive framework that provides the opportunity for exploring NOS in contextualized and thematic instructional settings because they are dynamically interrelated (Dagher and Erduran, 2017). The FRA organizes different features and characteristics of NOS coherently to show how science functions as a system (Dagher and Erduran, 2017) and provides a broader understanding of NOS because it includes categories