forms of justification

summary

Students use many different forms of justifications, including empirical evidence (McNeill & Krajcik, 2012), science ideas (Osborne et al., 2004), appeals to authority, plausible mechanisms, and prior experiences (Sandoval & Cam, 2011). While students may use many different forms of justification, some forms are more accepted within the scientific community.  One example is the preference for data as a form of justification (Sandoval & Cam, 2011).  While another form of justification, such as science ideas or an appeal to authority, used in combination with empirical evidence can serve to further strengthen the argument, the value of these other forms of justification diminish when they stand-alone.  In this project we present a way to measure students’ abilities to critique the forms of justification in reading, writing, and talking tasks.

definitions

  • Empirical evidence: using observations or measurements to support the claim
  • Science ideas: using scientific concepts that support the claim
  • Authority: appealing to what an expert or scientist said to support the claim
  • Prior experiences: appealing to something students have previously seen or felt to support the claim
  • Plausible mechanisms: contriving a process (mechanism) to make sense of a phenomenon, but is not necessarily scientifically accurate

Construct map

A construct is a characteristic of an argument.  Construct maps use research on student learning as well as expert knowledge to separate the construct into distinct levels that characterize students' progression towards greater expertise (Wilson, 2005).  The writing forms of justification construct map (see below) has three levels: 1) less important justifications, 2) mixture of justifications, and 3) more important justifications.

assessments

We developed four different writing items.  While the topic of two of the items focuses on earthquakes, the other two items focus on volcanoes.  The students’ response to a writing item is used to place their ability at one of the levels on the construct map.  For instance, if a student only uses a personal story to justify their argument, then he would be placed at the “less important forms” level of the forms of justification construct map.  However, the forms of justification construct is only 1 of 5 different ways the students’ written response will be assessed.  In addition to forms of justification, we encourage you to consider relevant-supporting evidence, sufficiency of evidence, multiple views, and reasoning (maps and rubrics are provided for each).  While the students’ of highest ability will score high on all of the constructs, students of lower ability levels may have different strengths and weaknesses.
Writing

rubrics

Each of the four items are constructed response.  Therefore, we developed a rubric to grade/score each of the constructed response items.  Each rubric includes sample student responses for each level.

teaching strategies

It is our hope that, over time, students’ abilities will move towards the “more important justifications” level of the construct map.  To assist teachers with this goal, we have developed teaching strategies. The following teaching strategies are intended to support students in moving to higher levels for Forms of Justification, Relevant Supporting Evidence and Sufficiency of Evidence, since we've found that it is difficult to focus exclusively on one area when teaching, and improvement in all of these areas can be seen when focusing on similar learning experiences that enhance the learning of all levels at once. 

Construct Level

Level 2 & 3
(Mixture of Justification & More Important Justifications)













Levels 0 & 1
(No justifications & Less Important Justifications)

Description of Teaching Strategies

Comparing Written Arguments







Sorting Evidence to Create the Most Convincing Argument







Card Sort and Writing an Argument Given Evidence for a Single Claim




Card Sort and Writing an Argument Given Evidence for Competing Claims

Resources

Lesson 1:  American Eel Population

Lesson 2:  Baking Soda and Vinegar

Lesson 1a:  Fossil Tooth

Lesson 1b:  Fossil Tooth

Tech reports

The tech report provides the psychometric analyses from pilot studies with middle school students.

references

McNeill, K. L., & Krajcik, J. (2012). Supporting grade 5–8 students in constructing explanations in science: The claim, evidence and reasoning framework for talk and writing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Osborne, J., Erduran, S., & Simon, S. (2004). Enhancing the quality of argumentation in school science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41(10), 994-1020. 

Sandoval, W. A., & Cam, A. (2011). Elementary children’s judgments of the epistemic status of sources of justification. Science Education, 95(3), 383-408.