The High-Adventure Science project’s goal is to bring the excitement of frontier science into the classroom by allowing students to explore pressing unanswered questions in Earth and Space Science that scientists around the world are currently investigating. While we do not expect that students will be able to solve the problems posed in the curriculum, our goal is to have students experience doing science the way scientists do. It’s the approach that matters—one based on thinking critically about evidence, making predictions, formulating explanations, drawing conclusions, and qualifying the level of certainty of those conclusions.

Making and defending claims are the hallmarks of critical thinking and scientific argumentation skills, but our curriculum doesn’t stop there. To examine how students develop critical thinking when they make claims based on evidence, we have also developed new explanation-certainty item sets. These item sets consist of four separate questions that require students to (1) make a scientific claim (claim); (2) explain their claim based on evidence (explanation); (3) express their level of certainty (certainty); and (4) describe the source of certainty (certainty rationale). We ask these four questions separately since the use of justifications and reasoning about certainty do not naturally occur in student answers (Kelly, 2002; Sandoval, 2003). These item sets measure students’ critical thinking by having students formulate explanations and justifications to support their claims (Zohar & Nemet, 2002).

Our research focuses on characterizing students’ understanding of science content and developing students' scientific analysis and argumentation skills.

Primary Research questions:

• How do students’ scientific argumentation abilities change during and after the use of High-Adventure Science investigations?
• How do students' content knowledge change during and after the use of High-Adventure Science investigations?
• How do students’ justifications and considerations of rebuttal change during and after High-Adventure Science investigations?
• What types of uncertainty do students exhibit while working with complicated computational models and scientific data sets?

Focus on Uncertainty

To evaluate students’ process skills, we developed a theoretical construct that will enable us to focus on two important aspects of the nature of science: 1) explanation and 2) explanations in the context of scientific argumentation.

In the second part of the explanation-certainty item set, students explain their claims.  Students' explanations of their claims are scored against item-specific rubrics.  A generic explanation rubric is shown below.

In the fourth part of the explanation-certainty item set, students explain their rationale for choosing a particular certainty rating.  Students' certainty rationales are scored with the following rubric, which classifies their uncertainty into personal and scientific categories.

Combining students' scores for their claim, explanation, certainty ranking, and certainty rationale, we developed the following “scientific argument and claim uncertainty” rubric.  This is used to score students’ overall performance on the process skills assessments embedded within the curriculum and in pre- and post-tests.

Early Results

Our analysis of the explanation-certainty item sets administered to 956 students by 12 middle and high school teachers in the northeastern United States indicates that justifications of claims and certainty rationales can reveal students’ critical thinking and that students who can coordinate claim and evidence are more likely to think about scientific factors influencing their certainty.

Furthermore, 419 Students showed significant improvement in understanding science content and in scientific argumentation ability, as measured from paired pre- and post-tests for each investigation (p<.01 for the climate investigation; p<.001 for the water investigation; p<.05 for the space investigation). We determined that students’ pre-post improvement in science content and scientific argumentation skills were directly related to how well they performed on the explanation-certainty tasks within the investigations, with the correlation coefficient (r) between 0.68 for the space investigation and 0.84 for the climate investigation (The water investigation is currently being analyzed.). In other words, the more students were exposed to the explanation-certainty item sets, the better they did on the post-test.

References

Kelly, G. J., & Takao, A. (2002). Epistemic levels in argument: An analysis of university of oceanography students’ use of evidence in writing. Science Education, 86, 314-342.

Sandoval, W. A. (2003). Conceptual and epistemic aspects of students’ scientific explanations. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(1), 5-51.

Zohar, A., & Nemet, F. (2002). Fostering students’ knowledge and argumentation skills through dilemmas in human genetics. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39(1), 35-62.