Investigating the Effects of Argumentation-Supported Environmental Education on Students’ Academic Achievements, Environmental Attitudes and Argumentation-Skills

This study aims to examine the development of academic success, attitudes towards the environment, and argumentation skills of 10th-grade students by applying the argumentation method to environmental problems. A convergent parallel design, one of the mixed-methods designs was used in this study. In the high school biology curriculum; units that cover environmental problems are included in the 10th-grade. For this reason, a study was conducted with a class of 10th-grade students. To collect the data, a multiple-choice Environmental Achievement Test (EAT) prepared by the researchers on the topic of "Environmental Problems", a likert-type Environmental Attitude Scale (EAS) developed by Uzun et al. (2019), activities on the topic of argumentation-based environmental problems prepared by the researchers, and the argumentation rubric prepared by Sadler and Fowler (2006) for the evaluation of the activities were used. It was concluded that 11 out of 13 students who participated in our research had an increase in their argumentation quality at the end of the argumentation activities compared to the first activity. There was a 138.23% increase in the average score of the EAT and a 7.93% increase in the average score of the EAS. Based on the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test results, it can be said that the applied argumentation method has a significant effect on improving students' academic achievement and environmental attitudes.