Abstract
The present study has two goals: to explore elementary students’ understanding of evidence and the ways they deploy it to construct arguments, and to examine whether eliciting their concept of evidence during argumentation improves students’ evidence-based reasoning. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 4th and 6th graders (N = 66) in a public school in Mexico. We found significant differences between groups regarding the concept of evidence, with better performance in the older group. A positive correlation between the concept of evidence and the quality of evidence-based reasoning was found. Also, three performance profiles were observed after eliciting the concept of evidence when grade was excluded as a factor. Results suggest that the concept of evidence plays an essential role in developing argumentative competence in pre-adolescence.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (EDU2013-47593-C2-2-P; DGICYT 2018_RTI2018-097289-B-I00 and the PRX18/00039).
Funding
This Study was supported by the Mexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tectonología (Andrea Miralda-Banda, PhD Grant), and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competeitividad (Merce Garcia-Mila, Grants Nos.: EDU2013-47593-C2-2-P; DGICYT 2018_RTI2018-097289-B-I00 and PRX18/00039).
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Andrea Miralda-Banda declares that she has no conflict of interest. Merce Garcia-Mila declares that she has no conflict of interest. Mark Felton declares that he has no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Appendix
Appendix
Justification before elicitation
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Why do you think is people abandon dogs?
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How do you know that is the cause?
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If you want to convince someone that this is the cause people abandon dogs, how would you demonstrate it?
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Can anyone else prove that this is the cause of dogs’ abandonment? Who? How?
Evidence concept and function elicitation
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Do you know what is an evidence?
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What does evidence serve for?
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Could you give me an example, so I can understand it better?
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Thus, an evidence is…
Justification after elicitation
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Then, if I tell you: “What evidence could you provide to demonstrate that this is the cause of dogs’ abandonment” What evidence would you give me?
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Can you think in another evidence?
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Can anyone else give me another evidence(s) to demonstrate that this is the cause of dogs’ abandonment? Who? What evidence?
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Miralda-Banda, A., Garcia-Mila, M. & Felton, M. Concept of Evidence and the Quality of Evidence-Based Reasoning in Elementary Students. Topoi 40, 359–372 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09685-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09685-y