Esther Dabagyan
SED 625
11/28/06
Dr. Rivas
Current Event # 4
My fourth current event is about a research paper tilted The Features of Peer
Argumentation in Middle School Students’ Scientific Inquiry, by Heekyong Kim and
Jinwoong Song. The main focus on the paper was to answer the following questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
What are the sources of evidence used in students’ arguments?
Which strategies are used in students’ argumentation?
How does critical discussion proceed?
Which types of discussion are found in critical discussion? (Kim and Song, 2005)
The researchers focused on eight eighth graders; two boys and six girls in a middle
school in Seoul, Korea. The students conducted an open inquiry activity in small groups
of two and three where they had to write a report for peer review and defend their report
through a critical discussion. The whole study took place over a 2 month period where
the eight students were given surveys, recorded with audio and video and asked about
their experience. None of the students had conducted an open inquiry before where they
had to decide on a problem and devise their own procedure. They also had never written
a report for their peers nor had a critical discussion about their findings. However, all
eight students had middle to high achievement levels in science, thus giving them a
comfortable level of scientific background knowledge with which to have good
discussion with. The same can not be said about most of my students.
The findings were that the majority of evidence used by students during
arguments was personal evidence and not “authoritative” evidence, such as evidence
from external literature or the teacher. It was found that students used a variety of
strategies during argumentation including criticism, repetition, cutting short of an
opponent, challenging, muttering, negotiation, changing the topic, suggesting and
explicating closing the topic. The discussions proceeded typically in four stages,
focusing the argument, exchanging information and details, debating and closing the
argument. Most debate resulted in a coexistence of ideas where groups acknowledges that
there may be more than one possible answer or confrontation where the groups rejected
the other group’s outcome. Consensus was not reached by the groups very of then.
I found it interesting that the focus of the paper was not to gage the quality of
argumentation but to discover the process. However, at the same time, there were not
enough logistical details, such as how much time exactly was given for students to write
their group reports, to implement this in my own classroom. It is clear that open inquiry
lessons were designed to help students argue; however the 2 month timeline seems very
unrealistic, especially when the process is described at cyclic, allowing students to go
back and redo their experiments after their critical discussions and peer-reviews of
reports.
One problem the students had was finding a topic or a problem to investigate. The
authors admit that this stage actually took half the allowable time for the entire process. I
have also noticed this to be a problem with my own students. Each group did a different
inquiry experiment however; they were given guidelines for their reports. It seems that of
all the three groups, they each had the opportunity to report to two different groups, and
listen to two different groups. It is unclear as to what the third group did while the other
two where in the process of peer review and argumentation since the events are described
as two group events. Was the third group allowed to observe or were they removed from
the class? The excerpts from their discussions seem very advanced, I do not believe that
the students would be as calm and thoughtful had the debate been in front of a class of
thirty-five instead of their two peers.
Ultimately, this study speaks volumes to me, in that in shows me that I must build
into my labs the opportunity for my students to analyze and reflect on their data. And
while there seems to be one predominant method of argumentations, the study states that
there were many complex types of processes also, where the stages they identified were
mixed up. This seems very true to real science, where there isn’t just one way to conduct
an experiment, but many. I’m unsure whether this study is positing that peer
argumentation is the best way to force students to reflect and analyze their data, but it
certainly seems to be leaning that way. If perhaps they had cast a wider net, thus
increasing their sample size, their finding would be more exciting and relevant. I’m not
sure how my English language learners would handle a report for peer review, let a lone a
debate about their findings in an experiment. If I were to implement something similar in
my classroom, it would have to be for only very few labs and in a guided inquiry
experiment rather than open inquiry.
Kim and Song reported that the students expressed interest in reforming their
hypothesis and most even went back after their peer review and performed their
experiment again, controlling more variables and re-working their methods. When I read
this, it was a science teacher’s dream come true that students would actually desire to
modify their experiments to such detail, and the education in this is invaluable but really
– who has the time? How can we as teachers come up with the time for students to re-do
labs, especially after we give then the time to present and argue the lab reports in front of
their peers. The paper certainly makes the point that when students must defend and
support their claims against a peer’s critique, they are held to a higher standard of
reflection. However, until a wider study is done that shows how the argumentative
process translates to scores on standardized tests and closing achievement gaps, I do not
see many time-constrained teachers adopting this feature of inquiry based learning.