Dive Brief:
- Debate and argument can help students anchor scientific concepts and can be woven into hands-on learning approaches. Students in Massachusetts’ New Bedford School District demonstrated this by assessing even the plausibility of UFOs or Bigfoot while studying at the district’s aquatic and marine center.
- To that point, “all ideas in science have to be argued for,” said Jonathan Osborne, the Kamalachari professor of science education, emeritus, at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
- Without having students look for evidence of the phenomena they are studying — be it matter conserved in a chemical reaction or the DNA in a cell — they are taking information at face value, he said.
Dive Insight:
“If that evidence and the arguments for the conclusions are not presented, then students have to accept it on faith,” Osborne said. “Having beliefs that you cannot justify is poor currency.”
Osborne suggested that educators should be working with students to help them learn how to build arguments within a science curriculum. Hands-on learning coupled with science education is a good way to learn how to use and look for evidence in the service of learning science, he said.
“You can only debate scientific facts if you have evidence to support your view,” Osborne said. “Scientific facts are not opinions. They are warranted conclusions based on what we know about the world.”
Osborne noted that it’s critically important for teachers to help students learn how to assess and evaluate evidence used to bolster their arguments and pass certain steps.
The first is whether a source has a conflict of interest. A paper touting the benefits of green laws from an institute producing fertilizer should raise a red flag, he said.
Second, the evidence should come from someone with scientific expertise in the area discussed. An astrophysicist, for instance, is probably not the best expert when building an argument around immunology.
Finally, Osborne said, students should seek consensus on an issue. If someone makes a claim that goes against consensus, he suggested that it borders on thin ice.
Osborne points to scientific concept cartoons as one way to introduce argument into a K-12 science classroom. He also said educators can debate topics such as whether a seed is alive with students while bringing them on a walk into nature, looking at the criteria of a living state and what constitutes something being a decomposer.
“It gets people talking about the science, using the language of science and explaining it to each other, and it gets people listening to other arguments and thinking critically,” Osborne said. “All of which are positive.”
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