Learning to Argue: How Do 4th and 6th Grade Students Use Multimodal Materials to Solve a Socioscientific Issue?

In light of the current eco-social crisis, environmental education must adopt a transformative, critical literacy-based approach grounded in scientific practices to prepare students to address socioenvironmental issues from a systemic perspective. This study, which was conducted with 4th and 6th-grade primary school students (aged 9–12), presents the results of an activity based on a socioscientific issue about the presence of pharmaceuticals in surface water. The aim is to evaluate students’ performance in argumentation, their use of and understanding of the materials from which they extract evidence, and the solutions they propose. To this end, the content (written reports) and discourse (group discussions) were analyzed, and different statistical tests were carried out to compare individual and group performance, as well as performance among educational levels. The results show students in both years tend to perform at a low-to-medium level, with higher performance in 6th grade, but there are no significant differences in most areas. They also use materials in different semiotic modalities; similarly, they experience more difficulty with maps and graphs than with texts and videos. Additionally, they propose solutions from various perspectives. Overall, this approach contributes to the development of scientific reasoning in primary school students and should therefore be incorporated into their classroom culture.