Prior Knowledge, Epistemic Beliefs and Socio-scientific Topic Context as Predictors of the Diversity of Arguments on Socio-scientific Issues

Abstract

The present study examines whether university Education students’ prior knowledge regarding controversial socio-scientific issues (SSIs), epistemic beliefs and socio-scientific topic context can predict the types of arguments about SSIs that students construct, by single persons in personal reasoning. University Education students (elementary or early childhood Education majors) were asked to construct different types of supportive arguments – social, scientific, ethical, economic, ecological – as well as counterarguments and rebuttals after they had read a topic scenario on a health SSI. We used three different health SSI topics to investigate whether the context of the scenarios has an effect on students’ ability to construct different types of arguments. Students’ prior knowledge on the SSI topic and epistemic beliefs were assessed separately. Results showed that students’ prior knowledge and epistemic beliefs predicted the diversity of arguments that students constructed. In particular, students who exhibited relatively high prior knowledge scores and held sophisticated epistemic beliefs about the structure of knowledge, produced more arguments of different types. The context of individual scenarios of health SSIs does not demonstrate significant predictive power for the diversity of arguments by single persons in personal reasoning. Educational implications are discussed.