Co-constructing Strategies to Enhance Support and Effectiveness in Teaching Scientific Argumentation with Technology

Scientific argumentation is one of the eight essential practices in the Next Generation Science Standards. It involves the use of empirical evidence, and encourages students to engage collaboratively in scientific activities, fostering a deeper understanding of how scientific knowledge is generated. Over the past decade, various methods have been employed to help middle-school students develop argumentation skills in formal learning environments. Despite these efforts, teachers continue to face challenges in motivating and engaging students, particularly in addressing the increasingly varied needs of students. Additionally, districts and schools struggle to integrate these research-based methods into their curriculum in ways that gain buy-in from teachers, students, and stakeholders. To address these challenges, this partnership development project brings together the West Aurora School District in Illinois and Northern Illinois University to pursue two primary goals: (1) co-construct a research and development plan focusing on ways to enhance support and effectiveness in the teaching practice of scientific argumentation through technology, and (2) develop a model for building a design research partnership between a school district and a mid-size public university. The project will be guided by a Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) leadership team that includes six middle school science teacher leaders, a student steering committee, a parent steering committee, a school administrator, and four university researchers. This project supports the goals of NSF's DRK-12 program by catalyzing research that enhances all preK-12 teachers' and students' opportunities to engage in high-quality learning experiences in science and by promoting collaborative partnerships among STEM education researchers, school leaders, teachers, students, and parents.

The project will use a Participatory Research approach and employ a variety of data collection methods, including Value Mapping activities, focus group discussions, and workshops. Focus group discussions will be facilitated to explore the collective views and experiences of all partners, including the RPP leadership team and middle school science teachers who are not part of the leadership team. Additionally, interviews will be conducted using open-ended prompts to gather in-depth insights from partners. Observations will be made during all RPP activities to capture partner interactions and dynamics. During the Value Mapping Activity, all partners will collaboratively identify and map the values, priorities, and concerns of the organization. Participatory workshops also will be conducted to actively engage partners in the research and decision-making process. The leadership team will collaboratively code data from multiple sources, and all involved partners will receive summaries of these analyses. Advisory board members--informed by survey data, transcriptions, observation notes, RPP activity data, and the summary reports--will provide feedback based on the RPP framework. At the conclusion of the project, the deliverables will include a research and development plan and a scalable model for building a design research partnership.