Perspectives on Scientific Argumentation Theory, Practice and Resear
Argumentation—arriving at conclusions on a topic through a process of logical reasoning that includes debate and persuasion— has in recent years emerged as a central topic of discussion among science educators and researchers. There is now a firm and gene
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Myint Swe Khine Editor
Perspectives on Scientific Argumentation Theory, Practice and Research
Foreword by Deanna Kuhn
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Editor Myint Swe Khine Bahrain Teachers College University of Bahrain Manama Kingdom of Bahrain [email protected] [email protected]
ISBN 978-94-007-2469-3 e-ISBN 978-94-007-2470-9 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2470-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939071 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Foreword
This volume, together with a similar recent collection edited by Erduran and Jiménez-Aleixandre (2007), mark the concentration of attention now being devoted to argumentation as a process central to science and to science education. The idea of science as argument (Kuhn, 1993, 2010) is a key one in that it encompasses both the epistemological and the procedural aspects of doing, teaching, and learning science. Accordingly, it has significant implications for just about all of the concerns of science educators (Duschl, 2008). The epistemological implications are the most challenging for science educators. It is one thing for us to recognize argument as the core of scientific practice and quite another to get young students, and even older ones, to conceptualize science in this way. In Chapter 2, Nussbaum, Sinatra, and Owens discuss the need to confront students’ misconceptions, and perhaps the most pervasive and enduring of these is the misconception of science as an accumulation of facts. If students are to come to believe otherwise, it is essential that educators model scientific practice as something else than this – namely, as a successive revision of theories as new evidence is brought to bear on them. In the absence of such modeling, how can we expect students to replace their naïve epistemologies of science with more robust ones? Argumentation is of course the heart of scientific practice. With the right kind of modeling, engagement, and practice, students can come to experience this scientific process for themselves. In so doing they stand to transform their conception of the product of science from one of facts to one of arguments and the scientific process to one of coordinating theories and evidence. As Cavagnetto and Hand put it in their chapter (Chapter 3), they come to recognize the distinction between data and evidence. There is as yet little rigorous evidence that engagement in science as argument is sufficient to engender change with respect to this epistemological transformation, but a recent intervention study by Iord
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