Contingency in peer scaffolding when addressing socio-scientific issues in biotechnology

• Birgitta Berne ^[1]
  1. [1] Lindaskolan
• Localización: Biology education research: contemporary topics and directions / Blanca Puig Mauriz (dir.), Paloma Blanco Anaya (dir.), María José Gil Quílez (dir.), Marcus Grace (dir.), 2020, ISBN 978-84-16723-97-3, págs. 155-166
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Although policy and research in science education suggests that students learn best when engaged in discussions about socially relevant issues, less is known about how this actually happens in the classroom. This paper reports on a research project in a secondary school in Sweden, which examined the processes taking place in a peer-group discussion during a unit focussed on the desirability of universal DNA registers. Prior to the students’ (14-15 years old) discussions, varied prompts were used to highlight different aspects of the issue. In addition, students were given time to search further information themselves. Data were collected through students’ own video recordings of the discussions. The results suggest that the notion of scaffolding is relevant for analysing students’ dialogical argumentation and for understanding the interactions in a group where no student appears to be more knowledgeable than the others. This study shows that students collectively may contingently scaffold each other to make more reflective arguments. Students support each other in affect, metacognition and cognition with the result that students start to structure their arguments by connecting scientific data and qualifiers to their claims. Furthermore, students begin to consider alternative perspectives and recognise challenges to their own position.