Infusing Argumentation into the SCALE-UP Environment

科学的论证和决策能力对于我们的大学毕业生成为21世纪劳动力的积极参与者至关重要。研究表明，通过学习科学论证的技巧，学生可以更有效地解决问题。在大量招生的本科科学课程中，帮助学生培养这些技能的努力很少。该项目将把面向未来工程师的物理学入门课程转变为一种整合科学论证的形式。该项目的主要目标是制定策略，帮助学生在小组合作解决问题和完成实验时进行科学论证。此外，该项目还将帮助教师和助教学习帮助学生发展辩论技巧的策略。该项目将评估这些变化对学生学习、态度和记忆的影响。先前的研究表明，论证性任务可以提高概念理解、认知信念和解决问题的能力。本项目将制定策略，培养在新情境下的科学论证，包括情境丰富的问题和对比案例。支持书面和口头论证的提示将被调整和改进，以创建论证任务的设计原则。这些策略将首先以SCALE-UP形式实施，然后再适用于其他形式的课程。将采用两阶段并行混合方法来评估这些干预措施对学生的概念理解、认识论信念、解决问题和辩论技能、态度和保留的影响。研究人员预计学生在概念理解、解决问题的能力和态度方面会有更高的收获，同时DFW率也会下降。

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.