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Dialogic Pathways to Manage Uncertainty for Productive Engagement in Scientific Argumentation

A Longitudinal Case Study Grounded in an Ethnographic Perspective

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Abstract

Scientific knowledge is advanced because scientists manage uncertainty. Although managing uncertainty is an essential practice of science, transferring it from expert settings to K–12 classrooms is problematic because, understandably, students are not familiar with the intentions of scientists. Few studies have explored learning science as an enterprise of uncertainty management. This longitudinal case study, grounded in ethnographic microanalysis of interaction, examines dialogic pathways for the dynamics of authority and accountability between students and teachers as a mechanism to understand how uncertainty gets raised and managed through resources related to the epistemic understanding of argument. The data sources include 15 videotaped fifth-grade, whole class discussions over a 20-week period. Students obtained peer feedback through discussions focused on group presentations of arguments regarding the scientific concepts of the ecosystem, the human body, and the day and night cycle. As time passed and as opportunities for students to engage in managing uncertainty increased, the dialogic pathways moved away from teacher-scaffolded to serpentine and to student-led. Results indicate that elementary school students are able to engage in uncertainty management, yet they need support from the teacher to know how to use resources effectively. Student development of scientific practices and knowledge may depend on teachers knowing when to authorize and hold students accountable as they work to resolve their uncertainty, learning how to interpret data as evidence, and using resources productively. A schematic model is conceptualized regarding the tensions between authority and accountability that shape the three dialogic pathways to manage uncertainty.

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Notes

  1. Uncertainty is defined differently from the concept of “tentativeness” used in the literature related to nature of science (NOS). Tentativeness refers to individual’s view of how “scientific knowledge is subject to change with new observations and with the reinterpretations of existing observations” (Schwartz et al. 2004, p. 613). Uncertainty, at an individual-cognitive level, refers to an individual’s subjective experience of being unsure of how to explain a situation he/she encounters based on his/her current knowledge.

  2. The Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST) are the highest honors bestowed by the US government specifically for K–12 science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and/or computer science teaching (https://www.paemst.org/about/view).

  3. Argument, consisting of claim, data, evidence, and reasoning, is conceptualized as a product of argumentation to explain a phenomenon. Representations or explanation of an argument in dialogical interaction can be oral or written (e.g., drawings, tables, materials) forms in order to fully represent and explain individual’s ideas (Cavagnetto et al. 2009). The distinction between “arguments,” “models,” and “explanations” has been vigorously debated in the science education literature (Berland and McNeill 2012; Brigandt 2016; Osborne and Patterson 2011). Pedagogically speaking, the meanings of those terms are overlapping and intertwined. The distinction is not necessarily always fruitful in terms of helping teachers understand how to engage students in authentic scientific practices, especially when those practices “are mutually supportive” (Berland and McNeill 2012, p. 810). Therefore, an argument in this study is defined broadly to include any forms of product from simple ideas to more sophisticated model-based representations that are used to explain any concepts.

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Acknowledgment

I gratefully acknowledge the feedback of Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Sibel Erduran, five anonymous reviewers, and Terry Christenson at Knowledge Enterprise of Arizona State University, on earlier version of the paper.

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  1. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5411, USA

    Ying-Chih Chen

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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2017 biennial meeting of the European Science Education Research Association (Dublin, Ireland) and at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, NY, USA).

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Table 9 Overview of three units over 20 weeks
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Chen, YC. Dialogic Pathways to Manage Uncertainty for Productive Engagement in Scientific Argumentation. Sci & Educ 29, 331–375 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00111-z

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