Argumentation is an indispensable part of scientific knowledge construction, and the inquiry laboratory is full of opportunities for argumentation. Yet, at primary schools, students learn science without any inducement to argumentation or inquiry. To fill this need, this study was aimed to develop pre-service primary teachers' understanding of and…

Many museums deal with socio-scientific issues--meaning topics with multiple perspectives and ongoing research, such as climate change, vaccinations, or livestock farming. As important and trusted sources of science education, museums can play a critical role in raising awareness about such issues. They tend to highlight the various perspectives…

Argumentation-based classroom interventions are a growing alternative for stimulating conceptual learning, thinking, and communicative skills. However, not all classroom argumentation is desired, nor does every argumentation design lead students to develop their abilities and understanding. In the educational literature, productive argumentation…

Despite growing emphasis on learning to argue and arguing to learn as educational outcomes in the secondary curriculum, a gap remains between these curricular goals and teachers' practices. The present study seeks to understand this gap by surveying 158 pre-service teachers about their knowledge, beliefs and predispositions related to…

The purpose of this study is to see how the inquiry-based nature of science (NOS) argumentation (IB-NOSA) instructional model affects scientific literacy skills. This research used a quasi-experimental method. The design of this research is a pretest-posttest control group design. This study describes the significance of the differences between…

We analyze here how pre-service teachers explicate their views about the wave-particle duality of photons and what role it plays in their arguments supporting the quantum nature of light. The data for the analysis is provided by 12 written reports about the double-slit experiment with feeble light. The analysis is based on constructing semantic…

The study examined preservice teachers' development in conceptions of NOS and their argumentation components using an explicit approach that targets NOS and argumentation. Participants were 20 preservice elementary teachers enrolled in a science methods course emphasizing explicit instruction of NOS and argumentation through various hands-on…

Studies show that supporting argumentation in mathematics classrooms is challenging for teachers. This study reports on the experience of seven elementary and middle-school mathematics teachers in an afterschool classroom-based program where they had the opportunity to facilitate research sessions on students' development of mathematical ideas and…

We examined the relationship between the levels of sophistication (high-sophisticated and low-sophisticated) of students' domain general epistemic beliefs and an important component of students' critical thinking skills--their ability to evaluate arguments. Participants evaluated arguments and took an epistemic belief survey before recalling…

Socioscientific issues (SSI), important for developing scientific literacy, are controversial issues related to social and scientific information. This study investigated the effect of argumentation about SSI on middle school students' views, attitudes, knowledge about SSI, and their scientific literacy. The study uses a pre-test and post-test…

Numerous variants of Kahneman and Tversky's (1972) hospital problem have been used to investigate intuitions about the Empirical Law of Large Numbers (eLLN). A largely separate line of research has focused on interactions between context knowledge and statistical reasoning. The present study merges these two lines of research by analyzing tertiary…

This study investigated the argumentation of 27 junior high school students in building their creative reasoning and the relationship between students' argumentation and their mathematical literacy skills. The data collected using mathematical literacy test and assessment rubric and were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The study found…

Scientific literature has shown abundantly that teacher professional development is a crucial factor for improving the quality of education. In this frame, this research analyzes teacher professional development of in-service higher education teachers who participated in training activities. This research has five goals not previously studied…

Thirty-eight interviewers with no prior investigative interviewing experience questioned school-aged children (N = 68, aged 6-10 years) about a personally experienced event. These interviewers relied primarily on question types that are not recommended by interviewing guidelines. Providing interviewers with misleading prior knowledge exacerbated…

Refutation texts are resurfacing as a suggested antidote to misconceptions and "fake news." In a previous critical review of the refutation text literature, we, the author team, suggested further interrogation of the assumptions these texts imply: that learners share the same common misunderstanding about a topic, and that there is one…