Research On Evaluation Tool Development Of Middle School Students' Scientific Argumentation Skills

With the development of science and technology,science education became more and more important around the world.The most important part is to cultivate students' scientific thinking ability,which could be improved by participating scientific argumentation activities.Scientific argumentation activities could also help enhance students' science knowledge.But teachers in our country did not pay much attention to the cultivation and training of it,it necessary to do some research about its teaching,learning and assessment to infuse it into the science education.The assessment of scientific argumentation can not only help us have a understanding of students' ability,it can also serve as the instruction to teaching and learning.Moreover,there are little research in this area,so this research will be focused on the development of evaluation tools of scientific argumentation and investigate middle school students' ability based on the tool.Last,we would know how well their scientific argumentation ability is and what their problems are.Firstly,the literature research method is used to review the current research and find out the questions that have not been solved,it also helps the discussion of theory related to it.In the first part of this research,scientific argumentation is divided into three types,and a construction model is established which could help us have a deeper understanding of it.The second part is to introduce what other research have done about the assessment of scientific argumentation,and it can be used as an implication for the research.Considering the situation of middle schools students in China and the progression of other research,the third part is the development of assessment tools which includes the assessment framework,assessment items and scoring standard.The assessment tool is designed on the basis of existed items and it is relying on the knowledge of Physics.The last part is the investigation,apart from their scientific argumentation skills,their gender and their score in the tests of Physics,Math and Chinese will also be considered.The investigation shows that middle school students' scientific argumentation ability in China is poor,especially their ability of using reasons to support their claim and rebutting.Additionally,most students could not well identify evidence and reason,they also have difficulties when identifying claims.Another problem is that they are not familiar with scientific argumentation activities,which reveals that they have never been trained about it.The third one is that students were intend to organize obscure answers using formulas and terminology instead of arguing.The outcome also shows that students' scientific argumentation ability is correlated with their performance in Chinese and Physics positively,but it do not have relationship with their ability in Math and their gender.In addition,situation and the complex degree of item could also influence students' performance in scientific argumentation tasks.