STEM Education Institute Tuesday Seminar
"Supporting Students in Using Evidence and Reasoning in Scientific Explanations and Arguments" will be presented by Katherine McNeill of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.
From Katherine McNeill:
"Argumentation and explanation have become increasingly prevalent as essential goals for science education in which students need to support claims using appropriate evidence and reasoning as well as consider and be critical of alternative explanations. Yet incorporating argumentation into classroom science is challenging and can be a long-term process. In order to help students and teachers with this difficult task, my colleagues and I developed an instructional model that we adapted from Toulmin's model of argumentation. In this talk, I will describe the instructional model as well as research studies in which we investigated how to support middle and high school students in scientific argumentation. Across the studies, we found that providing an explicit model, curricular scaffolds with context-specific support, and particular teacher instructional strategies increased the quality of students’ arguments."