Investigating students' engagement in epistemic and narrative practices of chemistry in the context of a story on gas behavior

This study investigated secondary school students' engagement in epistemic and narrative practices of chemistry in the context of a chemistry story on gas behavior. Argumentation is an example of an epistemic practice in science and stories are one kind of narrative (Ricoeur, 1981). By using a chemistry story, the authors hoped to engage students in the argumentation processes by linking chemistry knowledge to everyday contexts (Erduran and Pabuccu, 2012). Student group discussions and written frames during the activity were used as data sources. Analysis of these student outcomes concentrated on (a) the nature of the students' discourse; (b) the quality of students' argumentation; and (c) students' conceptual understanding of gas behaviors. The authors categorized the nature of group discourse using five different codes, determined the quality of student argumentation by counting the number of rebuttals, and measured conceptual understanding through students' answers in the writing frames. The results of this study add to the literature seeking to understand how to develop students' engagement in the argumentation process, how to enhance the quality of students' argumentations, and how to improve their conceptual understanding of gas behaviors

ARGUMENTATION AND STUDENTS' CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF PROPERTIES AND BEHAVIORS OF GASES

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of argumentation-based pedagogy on college students' conceptual understanding of properties and behaviors of gases. The sample consists of 108 students (52 in the control group and 56 in the intervention group) drawn from 2 general chemistry college courses taught by the same instructor. Data were collected through pre- and post-tests. The results of the study show that the intervention group students performed significantly better than the control group students on the post-test. The intervention group students also showed significant increase in their test scores between pre- and post-test. While at least 80 % of the students in the intervention group abandoned their initial ideas on all of the 17 alternative conceptions that were identified by the authors but one, the percent of student abandoning their initial ideas in the control group was less than 50. The discussion focuses on the implications of these results for addressing students' alternative conceptions, promoting the argumentation-pedagogy in college science courses and the challenges associated with the use of argumentation in college science classrooms