Our conversations about arguments began in Nashville in the Spring of 1996 in Richard Duschl’s doctoral seminar that we were both attending, Marilar Jiménez-Aleixandre as a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University. Jiménez-Aleixandre and Duschl were designing authentic problems in genetics for the University of Santiago de Compostela-based RODA project aimed at engaging high school students in argumentation. Erduran and Duschl had been working on Project SEPIA extending their work in Pittsburgh schools to the design of curricula that support epistemological aspects of scientific inquiry including argumentation. In that spring we attended a NARST s- sion in St Louis, where Gregory Kelly, Steven Druker and Catherine Chen presented a paper about argumentation. As a consequence, a symposium about argumentation was organised (possibly the first of its kind) at the 1997 NARST meeting in Chicago, including papers from Kelly and colleagues and from Jiménez-Aleixandre, Bugallo and Duschl. The symposium was attended, among others, by Rosalind Driver, who had just submitted an application for funding of an argumentation project based at King’s College London, a project Erduran would incidentally work on after Driver’s untimely death. From this time frame in the 1990s to the present day, argumentation studies in science education have increased at a rapid pace, from stray papers for which we were unable to find an appropriate strand in a conference, to a wealth of research base exploring ever more sophisticated issues.
This book brings together the work of leading experts in argumentation in science education. It presents research combining theoretical and empirical perspectives relevant for secondary science classrooms. Since the 1990s, argumentation studies have increased at a rapid pace, from stray papers to a wealth of research exploring ever more sophisticated issues.
This volume constitutes a unique collection and covers fundamental issues in argumentation such as cognitive, methodological and epistemological aspects; classroom-based research in teaching and learning of argumentation in science classrooms; and argumentation in context such as in socio-scientific and moral contexts. The book’s underlying premise is that argumentation is a significant aspect of scientific inquiry and plays an important role in teaching and learning of science. Argumentation also contributes to the agenda of informed citizenship where students are encouraged and supported in evidence-based reasoning in their everyday lives.
"Arumentation appeared as a major theme in science education research during the mid-1990s. Since that time, researchers working on themes such as the nature of science in science education, science education for citizenship, and language in the science classroom have all addressed argumentation in their work. This book brings together key lines of work and key scholars, presenting a state-of-the-art review of argumentation in science education."
Professor John Leach
The University of Leeds, UK
