Abstract
About three decades ago, the late Ronald Giere introduced a new framework for teaching scientific reasoning to science students. Giere’s framework presents a model-based alternative to the traditional statement approach—in which scientific inferences are reconstructed as explicit arguments, composed of (single-sentence) premises and a conclusion. Subsequent research in science education has shown that model-based approaches are particularly effective in teaching science students how to understand and evaluate scientific reasoning. One limitation of Giere’s framework, however, is that it covers only one type of scientific reasoning, namely the reasoning deployed in hypothesis-driven research practices. In this paper, we describe an extension of the framework. More specifically, we develop an additional model-based scheme that captures reasoning in application-oriented practices (which are very well represented in contemporary science). Our own teaching experience suggests that this extended framework is able to engage a wider audience than Giere’s original. With an eye on going beyond such anecdotal evidence, we invite our readers to test out the framework in their own teaching.
Highlights
The late Ronald Giere wrote a widely used textbook, entitled Understanding Scientific Reasoning, meant to introduce lower-division students to scientific reasoning
Throughout its four editions, the book was designed to impart to students the ability to understand and evaluate bits of scientific reasoning, as instantiated in popular press articles, semi-professional technical reports and scholarly publications
“the evaluation of any particular bit of reasoning is done by first reconstructing that reasoning as an explicit argument, with premises and a conclusion, and examining the reconstructed argument to see if it exhibits the characteristic form of a good argument, whether deductive or inductive” (Giere, 2001, p. 21, italics added)
Summary
The late Ronald Giere wrote a widely used textbook, entitled Understanding Scientific Reasoning, meant to introduce lower-division students to scientific reasoning. Scientists are primarily engaged in assessing the fit between models and target systems in the real world, i.e., in assessing whether their models are sufficiently similar to target systems to study the behavior of the latter by means of the former Giere indicates that his model-based approach better resonates with students. Cognitive scientists even have proposed that human cognition in general (not just scientific cognition) is best described in terms of mental modelling (Johnson-Laird, 1983, 2006; Nersessian, 2002, 2008) In their typical science courses, students are introduced to theories by means of models rather than arguments. In the research practices which most of our students are educated in, hypothesis-testing is typically embedded in application-oriented epistemic activities To capture this embedding and improve the usefulness to our audience, we developed an extension of Giere’s framework. Since much of contemporary science is application-oriented rather than hypothesis-driven, we submit that our framework will benefit teachers that work outside the confines of a technical university
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