Infusing Argumentation into the SCALE-UP Environment

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Scientific argumentation and decision-making abilities are critical for our college graduates to become active participants in the 21st century workforce. Research has shown that by learning the skills of scientific argumentation, students can become more effective problem solvers. There have been few efforts to help students in large enrollment gateway undergraduate science classes develop these skills. The project will transform an introductory physics course for future engineers into a format that integrates scientific argumentation. The main objective of this project is to develop strategies to help students to engage in scientific argumentation when they work in groups to solve problems and complete labs. Additionally, the project will prepare faculty and teaching assistants to learn strategies that help students develop argumentation skills. The project will assess the impact of these changes on student learning, attitudes, and retention. Prior research has shown that argumentative tasks can enhance conceptual understanding, epistemic beliefs and problem solving skills. This project will develop strategies to foster scientific argumentation in novel contexts including context-rich problems and contrasting cases. Prompts supporting both written and oral argumentation will be adapted and refined to create design principles for argumentative tasks. These strategies will be first implemented in the SCALE-UP format and then be adapted to courses in other formats. A two-phase concurrent mixed methods approach will be utilized to assess the impact of these interventions on students' conceptual understanding, epistemological beliefs, problem solving and argumentative skills, attitudes, and retention. The investigators anticipate higher gains in students' conceptual understanding, problem solving skills, and attitudes, as well as a drop in DFW rates.