<p>The ability to make
informed decisions is a skill considered as one of the 21st century skills and
is crucial as part of the critical thinking and problem-solving process in
science and engineering. Despite its importance, students (e.g., beginning
designers) often struggle with making informed design decisions that are well
supported by relevant scientific principles. It is not uncommon to see
disconnection between students’ design decisions and their scientific
knowledge. This type of disconnection is also described as the “design-science
gap”. Different approaches such as scaffolding have been done in trying to
bridge this gap, however there is still limited scaffold that could seamlessly
help students connect their scientific knowledge to their design experiences,
and consequently help them make scientifically informed design decisions. </p>
<p>In this dissertation, we proposed
argumentation as a scaffolding framework and investigated if the use of
argumentation as a meaning-making scaffolding approach during scientific
experimentation, facilitated students’ generation of informed design decisions
while completing a CAD-based design challenge. Specifically, we looked at the
impact of the argumentation scaffold on the quality of decision-making
arguments made by students, the types of claims made by students and the types
of evidence and reasoning they used to back up their claims, as well as their
level of performance in a final design challenge. </p>
<p>This study took place in a Physics for Elementary Education course in a Midwestern University
in Indiana, USA. This study was part of a four-week unit that focused on the
topic of heat transfer, as well as the practices of science and engineering
design. The
participants of this study included 54 groups of pre-service teachers (i.e., 2
to 4 students in each group) with a background in Elementary Education, from
three academic semesters: Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019. In this study, these
pre-service teachers were divided into two conditions – with and without
argumentation scaffold. The data analysis involved looking at the quality of
students’ decision-making arguments, the types of claim, evidence, and
reasoning they used, as well as their final design performances. </p>
<p>The results of this study
indicate that students in the argumentation condition were able to transfer
their argumentation skills from science experimentation to design
decision-making by demonstrating better ability to justify their decisions
using relevant scientific evidence and reasoning, as compared to students
without argumentation scaffold. Specifically, students engaged in the
argumentation scaffold generated decision-making arguments of higher quality,
devoted more attention to scientific principles when they made their decision
claims, used more variety of combinations of evidence and reasoning to support
their claims, utilized more scientific principles to back up their claims, as
well as achieved slightly better performance in their final design in terms of
fulfilling the size and energy consumption requirements. Implications from this
dissertation include pedagogical scaffold and assessment materials that can be
easily adapted by other educators, along with suggestions based on what we
learned. In addition, findings and lessons learned from this study open door to
more research opportunities such as expanding and adapting the scientific
argumentation framework to better fit in an engineering design context. </p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/14102801 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Creators | Ying Ying Seah (10188605) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/ARGUMENTATION_IN_THE_CONTEXT_OF_SCIENCE_EXPERIMENTATION_AS_PREPARATION_FOR_INFORMED_DESIGN_DECISION-MAKING/14102801 |
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