Online Learning Environments, Scientific Argumentation, and 21st Century Skills

Why Scientific Argumentation?

Inquiry is at the heart of current efforts to help students develop scientific literacy (AAAS, 1993; NRC, 2000). True scientific literacy involves understanding how knowledge is generated, justified, and evaluated by scientists and how to use such knowledge to engage in inquiry in ways that reflect the practices of the scientific community (Driver Newton, & Osborne, 2000; Duschl & Osborne, 2002). Scientific inquiry is often described in this literature as a knowledge building process in which explanations are developed to make sense of data and then presented to a community of peers so they can be critiqued, debated, and revised (Driver et al., 2000; Duschl, 2000; Sandoval & Reiser, 2004; Vellom & Anderson, 1999). The ability to engage in scientific argumentation (i.e., the ability to examine and then either accept or reject the relationships or connections between and among the evidence and the theoretical ideas invoked in an explanation or the ability to make connections between and among evidence and theory in an argument) is therefore viewed by many as an important aspect of scientific literacy (Driver et al., 2000; Duschl & Osborne, 2002; Jimenez-Aleixandre, Rodriguez, & Duschl, 2000; Kuhn, 1993; Siegel, 1989).