Facilitating student argumentation around socioscientific issues through productive discourse and negotiation toward consensus

Controversial topics that arise in science classrooms, especially those of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis), provide opportunities to help students learn about and discuss contradictory ideas they may encounter in their everyday experiences. Such topics may also be challenging to teach, but scaffolding may facilitate effective instruction. We describe one type of instructional scaffolding, the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) activity, that supports students’ reasoning when evaluating connections between lines of evidence and competing explanations about phenomena. We have developed and tested these activities in middle and high school classrooms, and empirical studies have shown that they help shift students’ thinking toward a more scientific stance via group discourse and collaborative argumentation. We developed a Negotiation Framework for productive discourse to facilitate students’ conversations toward consensus. This Negotiation Framework may be particularly effective in supporting argumentation and learning about topics in which scientific explanations compete with popular, but nonscientific, alternatives.