Characterizing and Promoting Secondary Students’ Reasoning about Evidence in Science

Abstract

An overlooked practice of claim evaluation with evidence in scientific reasoning literature is evaluating the evidence itself, especially in face of prior beliefs in science. The paper reports on secondary students’ evaluation of evidence in face of misconceptions in science, and the results of an intervention with them designed to promote this evaluation. This intervention embodied three conjectured contributing factors, including epistemological understanding, scientific explanation, and knowledge about experimental error. Seventh graders (N = 36) were asked to evaluate evidence that contradicted their prior misconceptions about Newtonian mechanics. They were engaged to evaluate three naïve responses to this question against materials that conveyed the ideas about the aforementioned factors. Results showed that prior to the intervention students had difficulties de-contextualizing their misconceptions from the reasoning, which may lead them to ignore the data, discount the method of obtaining the data and make it difficult to interpret the data variability. We found an overall positive effect of the intervention in facilitating students to attend to the evidence, accept the method, and interpret the data variability. However, individual differences in the effect existed. The study extends current research on claim evaluation by identifying students’ difficulties in reasoning about evidence that contradicted their misconceptions, and showing the aforementioned factors and the engagement in evaluating naïve responses facilitate this reasoning. Future research involves describing the processes by which the change in this reasoning occurs, and explaining how these processes lead to the change.