Investigating the Impact of the Duration of Engagement in Socioscientific Issues in Developing Greek Students’ Argumentation and Informal Reasoning Skills

Abstract

Argumentation seems to play a central role in science education. Among other factors that could affect students’ argumentation skills, the duration of their engagement in appropriate teaching environments or teaching interventions have been studied, yielding opposing results. Thus, the aim of this research was to shed light in this direction. For this purpose, we worked with 10th grade Greek state school students divided into two groups. Both groups attended a course called “Research Project” (RP), which aimed to approach the teaching of Biotechnology through socioscientific issues. The first group attended the course for two hours weekly for twenty weeks (long research project group – LRP), whereas the second attended the same course with exactly the same designing for three hours per week for 13 weeks (short research project group – SRP). At the end of the interventions, all students completed a questionnaire of eight open-ended questions on Biotechnology. Students were asked to express their opinion providing arguments which later were assessed using Toulmin’s model. Simultaneously, we estimated the informal reasoning they used to express their arguments, based on the classification: rationalistic, intuitive and emotive. The results revealed that students of the LRP group produced stronger arguments using rationalistic informal reasoning that is arguments of higher level supported by scientific data and multifaceted consideration of each issue of question, compared to the SRP group. Moreover, the intuitive informal reasoning was found to be significantly reduced statistically in the LRP group compared to the SRP group. Consequently, we concluded that the distribution of RP teaching periods throughout the school year was crucial to enhancing both students’ argumentation skills and their informal reasoning when expressing arguments. In other words, an intervention of longer duration can help students formulate more elaborate arguments based on scientific data.