Investigating the argument quality of middle school students on a socioscientific issue :|effect of local versus global context

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the socioscientific issue (SSI) context (local vs global) on the argument quality of 8th grade middle school students. The participants of the study are 69 eighth graders in a public school in Kocaeli. Quasi experimental design was used in this study. Argument quality of 8th grade students was determined via argument quality task which includes texts about plastic topic and argument quality questions. In this study, there are two different argument producing tasks. The two groups were engaged with the same SSI topic with two contextually different texts (local and global) in different order. Before the tasks, all groups were evaluated based on the argument quality questions to determine the prior argument quality of students. Then Group 1 engaged with local SSI text and asked to develop an argument based on the guiding questions while the Group 2 did the same with global SSI text. Two weeks later, texts were engaged to both groups in reverse order with the same manner. Students were given 40 minutes to complete prior argument questions, to read the text and to develop claim, reasoning, and rebuttal based on the guiding questions. After data collection process, the answers of students were converted to numeric values via argument quality evaluation rubric. Mann-Whitney U test for different group and Wilcoxon signed-rank test for the same group comparisons were performed. In the study, overall argument quality scores of local and global contexts were compared both in group and between groups. Additionally, the reasoning scores and rebuttal scores were analyzed separately for Group 1 and Group 2. The upper and lower groups have been created and their scores also were analyzed. Based on the SPSS results, there is no statistically significant difference between the local and global contexts both in group’ and between groups’ overall, reasoning and rebuttal scores. Furthermore, the specific data citation frequency of all participants was analyzed for total, reasoning and rebuttal components. Based on the comparison, results showed that the number of students who use specific data citation in their local text answers are higher than the number of students in global context.