Sunday, March 1, 2015

Manz' Student Argumentation article

Kirsten Rooks

Manz, E. (2014). Representing student argumentation as functionally emergent from scientific activity.Review of Educational Research (20), p 1-38. 

The National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education specifies eight scientific practices, including “Engaging in argument from evidence,” that students are to use as a means of building understanding about scientific ideas and concepts. Engaging in the scientific practices “helps students understand how scientific knowledge develops,” “it makes students’ knowledge more meaningful and embeds it more deeply in the their worldview,” and it “can also pique student’s curiosity, capture their interest, and motivate their continued study.” (p 42) 
In her paper, Representing student argumentation as functionally emergent from scientific activity, Eve Manz focuses initially on the Framework’s first stated rational of using the practices to instill in students an understanding of how “real” scientists conduct their work. She examines how well the scientific practice of argumentation as used in a scientific setting is comparable and/or transferrable to a classroom setting. Then, based on the different practices of a scientific setting and a classroom setting, she highlights ways in which the practice of scientific argumentation can best be adapted for the classroom. She also suggests some general instructional design parameters and future research ideas on how to best implement these practices to maximumly benefit students’ construction of scientific knowledge. 
Using a combined socio-cultural and cultural-historical activity theory lens, she defines practices as “embedded in a system of activity that lend them meaning… These systems include objects, goals, tools, and communities with particular norms and divisions of labor.” (p 3) Furthermore, “Because practices are sedimentations of solutions to problems, they have a historical and situated character and do not transfer unproblematically to new participants or locales.” (p 3) [BTW: This sentence, in which Manz efficiently, yet poetically, wraps up and delivers such a complex summation of an idea, is my favorite sentence in her paper.] 
She further elaborates that because the practices of a scientific setting are derived from objects, goals, tools, communities, and norms that are significantly different from those of a classroom, they (the practices) are not so easily transferred. She points out that in a scientific community, in which they are working with a high degree of uncertainty, the process of argumentation is used as much in the development of scientific knowledge - creating tools and investigations, evaluating results - as in the defense of the knowledge or idea after the fact. (p 4)
In the classrooms, science content and processes have tended to be presented as certain; they are stated in the curriculum and assessments and the teacher leads students to getting them right. In addition, generally the students’ goal in school is to get things right because that will lead to a good grade. In light of these conditions, the practice of authentic argumentation seems unlikely - what is there to argue and defend if the answer is already known? - and there is the possibility that argumentation becomes a distinct practice with rules and rubrics that students see as another thing to get right.
Manz makes a number of recommendations based on research to shift students’ use of argumentation so that it is used more as an authentic, knowledge-building practice like in scientific settings. She sums up the results of these recommendations collectively by stating, “I conceptualize argumentation as integral to students’ activity if it allows them to contest and agree on how they might know something, in turn, stabilizing particular models or inspiring new questions and models.” (p 20) Though the recommendations can be complicated, they can be implemented in the classroom through explicit instructional, class cultural, or curricular changes coupled with the time, practice, and persistence to implement them.
  1. The goal of students’ investigations and argumentation should be more significant than merely arguing after-the-fact findings in investigations. Such goals could include applying their knowledge to a broader phenomenon or to the understanding of or recommended action towards a larger social issue.
  2. Another important element in authentic argumentation is working with ideas and practices that are uncertain. She recommends that teachers identify areas where the methods and/or results of investigation, connection to larger scientific ideas, or overall claim are uncertain so that students have to truly examine, defend, and elaborate on their claims. (p 16)
  3. There must be a shift in the power structure of the class. Students have to stop viewing the teacher as the sole authority on the scientific knowledge and start seeing themselves and their classmates as those responsible for creating their own knowledge. 
  4. Teachers should present the students’ task as finding out how or why something is or how it applies to other phenomena as opposed to merely finding the right answer. This will involve asking fewer “yes/no” type questions and working on eliciting student ideas, opinions, elaborations, and critiques as a means to build knowledge.
  5. Students need to view themselves and their classmates as an audience who should ask questions about and ask for evidence for their ideas. Then students would start to view their own ideas more critically in preparation to defend them to others. This shift would involve establishing class-wide norms that emphasize the need to build one’s own knowledge, to listen to one another, to talk about, challenge, question, defend, and alter ideas.
  6. In order to be effective, scientific argumentation must follow certain norms, use of acceptable evidence and reasoning, and lead to knowledge building. Effective argumentation is complex and often unfamiliar to most students, and therefore must be explicitly taught and assessed. However, the teacher should focus on the purpose of argumentation more than the logistics of argumentation. Effective argumentation must be presented and understood by students to be ameans to build-knowledge, not an end product to be assessed independent of its purpose.
  7. To teach effective scientific argumentation, teachers can start with students’ knowledge and ability to argue based on other disciplines or even their out-of-school lives, and shift it to fit scientific argumentation. Teachers can also introduce end-claim argumentation first and extend its use backwards to the knowledge-building that led to the end-claim. 
  8. Argumentation is easier to learn, understand, and assess if it is presented as a physical representation such as a poster. In this format, the developing poster can serve as both a formative assessment to check students’ understanding as it builds and as a summative assessment of their overall understanding of the entire unit.
 Thought and question: Manz highlights both the importance of argumentation to build students’ knowledge as prescribed by the NGSS and the difficulty for teachers to implement this practice well. I believe I have a strong conceptual sense of scientific argumentation from Mark Windschitl’s Ambition Teaching Methods in Science class and a moderate practical sense of it for having worked to implement it for only about a year. 
How can this practice be taught to teachers effectively and at scale? Could this be done through an online training? How well are pre-service science teacher programs teaching argumentation as well as other NGSS practices? Is the answer the network-based method of teaching department heads or coaches or teacher leaders and hope/help them implement an ongoing PD with the fellow science teachers?


National Research Council. (2012). A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. Committee on a Conceptual Framework for New K-12 Science Education Standards. Board  on Science Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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