Stimulating Scientific Argumentation in a elementary School Class

Abstract

The argument, given as a set of premises or assumptions to defend a certain point of view, must be worked on the school environment aiming to improve the diffusion of ideas of the subjects involved. Linked to this fact, scientific argumentation enters, which is based on the complex foundation of observations and results in decision making. Thus, the objective of this work was to improve the aesthetics of scientific argumentation of students from an elementary school class, first analyzing how they argued in front of four pieces of news and, then, explaining a structural model of scientific argumentation to later ask them to rewrite the argumentative text. The main results show that initially the students, when faced with the news, only mentioned if they were false or true and, rarely, they gave justifications for their conclusion, and thus, after the dynamics of sugarplum, the arguments of the students became more complex, since most students made use of most of the elements of cientific argumentation. In other classes, it is observed that students began to increase the complexity of their arguments. Thus, as highlighted in the theoretical frameworks, scientific argumentation should be stimulated in science classes, and the result of this stimulus in the developed activity was the increase in the complexity of the students' scientific argumentation, evidenced by the substantial increase in elements of argumentation in the texts written by students.