During economic recessions, state funding for higher education contracts (Delaney & Doyle, 2011; Hovey, 1999; SHEEO, 2022). Despite this reality, public higher education officials need to offer insights and explanations to state legislators about the current status of their institutions and their needs when discussing their budget requests. We…

The purpose of this study was to measure to what extent an experimental method of teaching argument incorporating elements from both Toulmin's (2004) structural approach and Walton's (2013) dialectical approach effects first-year college students' ability to write strong arguments. This experimental instruction used critical questioning as a…

This article discusses "Rhetoric of Storytelling," a course that looks at the purposes of storytelling across different rhetorical traditions, beginning with Ancient Greek and Roman traditions and traversing African American, Indigenous Latin American, American Indian, feminist, and Latinx rhetorical traditions. The course operates from…

As part of their general education requirements, many incoming college students are required to enroll in composition courses that explore various college-level writing practices. Some students, including those who are part of Generation Z, struggle because they may be unfamiliar with academically-dense language, lack real-world experience using…

Incorporating scientific uncertainty as part of science teaching means acknowledging that there may be incomplete or potentially limited scientific information when scientists draw conclusions. In the geosciences, scientists routinely make inferences about the Earth based on observations of the present, and test those observations against…

The purpose of the quantitative ex post facto design of this study was to determine if, and to what extent, self-efficacy increases after the implementation of a pre-entry program for community college student athletes in Southern California. The self-efficacy theory provided the theoretical foundation to address the research questions in this…

Environmental forensics is the application of knowledge from geosciences and chemistry in a legal setting, e.g., to determine the origin and consequences of contamination events. Teaching environmental forensics requires reactivating prior knowledge from different fields of natural sciences, filling knowledge gaps, and connecting pieces of…

Avoiding the discussion of controversial topics in U.S. classrooms deprives students of an important part of their learning. Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson, authors of "The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools" (University of Chicago Press, 2017) say Americans are terrible at having informed,…

Developed by the National Writing Project (NWP), the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) seeks to improve students' argument writing by building teachers' understanding of and skill in teaching source-based argument writing. The program features intensive professional development, skill-based instructional resources, and…

This article explores undergraduates' efforts to engage in scientific argumentation during exam settings. Thirteen undergraduate students enrolled in an environmental science course completed exams with questions linked around a central theme. Three types of questions were used, including those that prompted students to construct scientific…

Considerable evidence suggests that dialogical interaction in the classroom promotes students' scientific knowledge building and reasoning. Hence, scientific argumentation is recognized as a central component of the Next Generation Science Standards. A focus on argumentation, however, requires teachers to adopt instructional practices that…

This article reports an investigation of a professional development program to enhance elementary teachers' ability to engage their students in argument from evidence in science. Using a quasi-experimental approach, three versions were compared: Version A--a 1-week summer institute with a 2-week summer practicum experience and 8 follow-up days…

This article describes how participants in the California Teacher Inquiry Network learn the art of making their invisible thinking processes visible, helping them see more clearly that they have internal resources to help students master similar kinds of thinking processes.

Despite the increasing attention to afterschool science programs, little is known about the conditions under which children likely engage in meaningful scientific practices, such as argumentation and scientific explanation in those settings. This analysis draws on X hours of video data collected of elementary-aged children (n = 4) during a 14-day…

In this article, the author describes two lessons in which students applied the scientific knowledge learned from studying offshore oil drilling to construct a fact-based argument on the topic and then communicate it to their policy makers, since public commentary was solicited. The students practiced using their scientific knowledge to…