Argumentative Discourse in a High School Chemistry Classroom

Issam Abi-EI-MonaFouad Abd-EI-KhalickUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignThis study aimed to identify the types of arguments promoted in various contexts common to a high schoolchemistry classroom, including lecture-discussion and laboratory activities. The study was guided by the follow-ing research question: What types of argument structures and schemes, if any, are promoted and engaged by stu-dents within various contexts in the participant classroom? Participants were 73 students enrolled in threesections of a grade 10 high school chemistry classroom. The same teacher taught all three sections and coveredthe same chemical topics. All regular and laboratory sessions were videotaped over the course of 2 months. Re-searcher fieldnotes were used to generate selective transcripts of argumentation evident during instruction. Ad-ditionally, semistructured interviews were conducted to assess participants' argumentative abilities in aninquiry-oriented context. Student arguments were found to be limited in number and mostly characterized by in-complete structures, especially in terms of warrants within all three target contexts. However, student reasoningschemes varied across the three contexts, with the most developed ones evident in the inquiry-based interviewcontext. It is argued that "traditional" science instruction contexts can be used to promote argumentation ifstudents are afforded certain support and guiding elements.National and international science education reformdocuments, science educators, and researchers havecome to consider argumentation as a central compo-nent of science education (e.g., American Associationfor the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 1993;Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Duschl & Ellenbo-gen, 2001; Millar & Osborne, 1998; National ResearchCouncil [NRC], 2000). Munford and Zembal-Saul(2002) and Zembal-Saul (2005) eloquently summa-rized the benefits of a focus on argumentation as fol-lows: (a) Learners can experience scientific practicesthat situate knowledge production in original contexts,which provide them with opportunities to learn notonly science content, but learning about science, aswell as including an understanding of the role of lan-guage, culture, and social interaction in the process ofknowledge construction (see also Driver et al., 2000;Osborne, Erduran, Simon, & Monk, 2001; Pontecorvo,1987); (b) engagement with argumentative discoursecan render learners' understanding and thinking visibleand, thus, provide a valuable tool for reflection and as-sessment (also see Abell, Anderson, & Chezem, 2000;Zembal-Saul & Land, 2002); and (c) argumentationcan support learners in developing different ways ofthinking (Kuhn, 1992, 1993). Unfortunately, argumentation is rare in K-12 scienceclassrooms (Driver et al., 2000; Yerrick, 2000) largelybecause the contexts necessary for promoting argumen-tation (e.g., authentic inquiries, socioscientific issues)are not part of the teaching ecologies that typify mostof these classrooms (Jimenez-Aleixandre, Rodriguez,& Duschl, 2000). Bringing argumentation into scienceclassrooms requires the enactment of contexts thattransform them into knowledge producing communi-ties, which encourage dialogic discourse and variousforms of cognitive, social, and cultural interactionsamong learners (Duschl & Osborne, 2002; Newton,Driver, & Osborne, 1999). Researchers have identified several contexts for pro-moting argumentation, which typically fall under therubric of socioscientific issues. However, the well-doc-umented difficulties that impede the enactment of in-struction focused on socioscientific issues(Abd-EI-Khalick, 2003; Zeidler & Keefer, 2003) ne-cessitate that more research be dedicated to assessingthe potential of contexts more common to scienceclassrooms for promoting argumentation. Thus, thisstudy aimed to identify the types of arguments, if any,that are promoted in various contexts commonly usedin a Grade 10 chemistry classroom. These contexts in-clude lecture-discussion and laboratory experiments.The guiding research question was: What types of ar-gument structures and schemes, if any, are promotedand engaged by students within various contexts in theparticipant classroom? Background and Review of the LiteratureKuhn (1992, 1993) broadly defined argumentationin science education as the process of proposing, sup-porting, criticizing, evaluating, and refining conflicting