Talking Science
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Talking Science Argument-Based Inquiry, Teachers’ Talk Moves, and Students’ Critical Thinking in the Classroom Yilmaz Soysal 1 Accepted: 9 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The paper reports an empirical study that examined relationships between the implementation quality of an argument-based inquiry (ABI) approach, teachers’ talk moves, and students’ critical thinking. Students were taught using an ABI approach in which they had opportunities to engage in critical thinking. However, this instructional approach was handled by a variety of teachers with differing capacities to implementing it. Systematic observation (talk move analysis) was therefore required to describe how quality of implementation affected students’ critical thinking. Four middle school science teachers and 92 seventh-grade students participated. Videos of in-class implementations were examined through classroom discourse analysis. It was observed that the ABI approach seemed to stimulate student-led critical thinking when implemented with higher quality. Teacher-led talk moves were correlated with implementation quality and had the ability to evoke or hinder students’ critical thinking. Instances of teachers evaluating students’ responses based on scientific knowledge and transmission of knowledge tended to inhibit students’ execution of higher-order critical thinking. Frequent use of less cognitively demanding talk moves, such as observe–compare–predict, did not seem to help students attain higher-order critical thinking. Four talk moves in particular (legitimating, challenging, monitoring, evidencing) appeared to be associated with higher implementation quality, in turn promoting students’ critical thinking. Communicating moves appeared to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of elaborate verbal exchanges. These encouraged students to perform higher-order critical thinking, though only in the presence of other talk moves (e.g., challenging, legitimating, monitoring, and evidencing).
* Yilmaz Soysal [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education, Department of Elementary Education, Istanbul Aydin University, Istanbul, Turkey
Y. Soysal
1 Introduction Encouraging students to engage in critical thinking in the science classroom has been acknowledged as a major goal (Tiruneh et al. 2018). Promoting critical thinking is widely accepted as essential for the meaningful acquisition of science concepts and science process skills (e.g., Kuhn 1999; Tiruneh et al. 2017). Core components of critical thinking such as decision-making, inference, advanced clarification, analysis, evaluation, and explanation are intertwined with the thinking practices used in scientific inquiry. It is also recognized that elementary and middle school students may find both scientific and critical thinking to be especially challenging (Cavagnetto 2010; McDonald and McRobbie 2012). The empirical study reported in this paper explored how science teachers’ implementation of argument-based inquiry (ABI) affected students’ critical thinking. Students
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