New Directions in Mathematics and Science Education Series

Book 1

Staging & Performing Scientific Concepts

by Lilian Pozzer Ardenghi and Wolff-Michael Roth

Published 1 January 2010

Book 22

Scientific & Mathematical Bodies

by SungWon Hwang and Wolff-Michael Roth

Published 1 January 2011

Book 26

On Meaning and Mental Representation

What More in/for Science Education

The Mathematics of Mathematics

Dialogical Argumentation and Reasoning in Elementary Science Classrooms

by Mijung Kim and Wolff-Michael Roth

Published 25 October 2018

Science educators have come to recognize children's reasoning and problem solving skills as crucial ingredients of scientific literacy. As a consequence, there has been a concurrent, widespread emphasis on argumentation as a way of developing critical and creative minds. Argumentation has been of increasing interest in science education as a means of actively involving students in science and, thereby, as a means of promoting their learning, reasoning, and problem solving. Many approaches to teaching argumentation place primacy on teaching the structure of the argumentative genre prior to and at the beginning of participating in argumentation. Such an approach, however, is unlikely to succeed because to meaningfully learn the structure (grammar) of argumentation, one already needs to be competent in argumentation. This book offers a different approach to children's argumentation and reasoning based on dialogical relations, as the origin of internal dialogue (inner speech) and higher psychological functions. In this approach, argumentation first exists as dialogical relation, for participants who are in a dialogical relation with others, and who employ argumentation for the purpose of the dialogical relation. With the multimodality of dialogue, this approach expands argumentation into another level of physicality of thinking, reasoning, and problem solving in classrooms. By using empirical data from elementary classrooms, this book explains how argumentation emerges and develops in and from classroom interactions by focusing on thinking and reasoning through/in relations with others and the learning environment.