Facilitating Student Argumentation Around Socioscientific Issues Through Productive Discourse and Negotiation Toward Consensus
Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.
Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena.