Content analysis of middle school students' argumentation in engineering

Abstract

In recent decades, argumentation has emerged as a major trend in K-12 science education.1, 2 Its proponents assert that argument-driven science education fosters conceptual understandings of the nature of science and can increase students' proficiencies with core scientific practices.3, 4 With the advent of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), 5 middle school students are expected not only to engage in argumentation about the natural world, but also to construct or refute claims related to solutions about the designed world (see Science and Engineering Practices related to MS-ETS1-2). In practice, according to the NGSS, middle school students can construct and justify claims about which engineering design solutions should be adopted. Though instruments have been developed and validated for assessing middle school students' learning progressions in argumentation in science, 6 comparable instruments have not been developed and validated for assessing students' argumentation in engineering. The purpose of this exploratory study was therefore to identify components of middle school students' arguments specific to engineering, and to begin to develop an assessment instrument that accounted for these specific elements. To achieve this goal, we conducted a content analysis of 69 middle school students' writing samples when asked to write an argument on behalf of their proposed engineering design solutions. We identified common patterns across their writing, and used these patterns to propose categories for a rubric that accounted for different dimensions of argumentation specific to engineering. In the following sections, we situate our study within previous empirical and theoretical literature, and then we describe the context in which the study was conducted and the methods by which the data were analyzed.