Teaching Practices for Scientific Argumentation in K–12 Classrooms

Frameworks of core practice in science teaching name practices either generally enough to span the disciplinary practices of the field or specifically toward explanation and modeling, leaving open what teaching requires when the practice at hand is argument. I elaborate those frameworks by specifying seven foundational teaching practices for argumentation that are scientific in nature. The practices are creating and leveraging instances of uncertainty, framing joint enterprise, making argumentation public, introducing and mediating argumentation tools, establishing and refining shared criteria for what counts as an acceptable argument, developing and maintaining norms for critique and disagreement, and noticing and responding to student reasoning and needs. What distinguishes them is the shift from building an account of a phenomenon to adjudicating among competing accounts, which asks a class to work out what counts as adequate reasoning rather than only to apply standards it has been given. Because the sciences reason in more than one style, and each carries its own epistemic criteria, the criteria a class develops are style-dependent rather than general. Equity is constitutive of the practices rather than a parallel commitment. I close by considering enactment under institutional constraint and implications for teacher educators, researchers, and curriculum designers.