An Approach to Generating Guidelines for Designing Scientific Argumentation Competence Assessments

Scientific Argumentation (SA) is an important scientific practice that engages students in cognitive, epistemic, and social endeavours to construct, evaluate, and reconstruct knowledge. Assessing SA is important because it helps in gaining insight into the nature of SA as understood by students and their engagement with SA while facilitating the teaching and learning of SA in school education. This study aims to explore how items can be written to create an SA assessment and what factors should be considered to improve SA assessment design. To assess students’ SA engagement, this study uses the elements of SA based on Toulmin’s argument pattern and approaches SA from three competencies that are needed to engage in SA, namely, Identifying, Evaluating, and Producing SA elements. A five-round iterative process was adopted to develop a scientific argumentation competence (SAC) assessment instrument. By analysing data from each round of the study, the instrument was modified and prepared for the next round of the study. Qualitative data from teachers’ interviews, students’ cognitive think-aloud, and students’ follow-up interviews were analysed using thematic analysis to find out the factors that may lead to better assessment design. Ten factors were found to influence the assessment, and after the assessment was modified according to these factors, students showed better engagement. To close, a SAC assessment design guideline is discussed based on the findings.