Digging Deeper into Dialogic Feedback: Evaluating How Science Teachers Manage Uncertainty as a Predictor of Students’ Ability to Construct an Epistemically Sound Argument

Mason Kuhn,Marine Pepanyan

doi:10.22158/wjer.v7n1p36

Abstract

In this study, we examined the relationship between the use of two teachers’ dialogue feedback as an educational practice to promote evidence-based argumentation in middle school science lessons and the students’ ability to create scientific arguments in a standardized critical thinking exam. The teachers had an equal amount of training on Argument-Based Inquiry (ABI) and taught in a federally-identified low-income school. When the patterns of talk were analyzed, divergent themes emerged and feedback that promoted critique correlated with student achievement on the critical thinking exam.

Highlights

The topic of argumentation has been researched extensively in science education over the last few decades, and asking learners to construct arguments from evidence has been a broadly supported goal in almost all science education policy
In this study, we examined the relationship between the use of two teachers’ dialogue feedback as an educational practice to promote evidence-based argumentation in middle school science lessons and the students’ ability to create scientific arguments in a standardized critical thinking exam
We were interested in the type of dialogic feedback that teachers used and evaluated if it would align with student achievement on a task that required critical thinking skills and the ability to defend choices based on evidence and reasoning

Summary

Introduction

The topic of argumentation has been researched extensively in science education over the last few decades, and asking learners to construct arguments from evidence has been a broadly supported goal in almost all science education policy. We draw on this work because our primary research is to attempt to measure if the teachers’ argumentation process of creating an environment for learning through feedback patterns results in any difference in the quality of the students’ product, measured by the argument they made on a critical thinking exam using a claim, evidence, and reasoning framework. Teachers struggle with implementing argumentation because it involves giving students increased control over the classroom discourse (Windschitl & Stroupe, 2017) This introduces a new level of uncertainty at the dialogic level of argumentation, and learning how to manage uncertainty during argumentation lessons productively has become a necessary skill for teachers in reform-based classrooms. We will describe dialogic feedback in greater detail

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