The Investigation Of High School Students’ Development On The Epistemology Of Scientific Argumentation

In the 21st century,scientific argumentation has become a major topic in the research of international science education.However,the existing researches on scientific argumentation pay a lot of attentions to evaluating the ability of students’ scientific argumentation without focusing on the perspective of how students know scientific argumentation and how to participate in scientific argumentation.Epistemology focuses on knowledge and its construction process,and scientific argumentation can also be treated as an essential process that people must be experienced to reach the scientific knowledge.Therefore,the epistemology of scientific argumentation is aimed at revealing how people know argumentation and how they participate in scientific argumentation in their minds.This study takes the epistemology of scientific argumentation as a further research topic by solving four questions:(1)What is the epistemology of scientific argumentation?(2)What are the structural elements involved in the epistemology of scientific argumentation?(3)How to develop a scientific,contextual assessment tool for evaluating students’ epistemology of scientific argumentation?(4)What is the development level of high school students’ epistemology of scientific argumentation?Based on the existing researches of scientific argumentation and the practical epistemology of Marxist practice in domestic and international,and various education research methods,this study conducted theoretical research on the concepts and structural elements of the epistemology of scientific argumentation,and explores and constructs the theoretical frame of the epistemology of scientific argumentation.Based on the theoretical framework and combined with contextualizing argumentation tasks,a set of scientific,contextualized questionnaires on the development of high school students’ epistemology of scientific argumentation was developed.Finally,questionnaire surveys were conducted on senior high school students in China to obtain the current situation and other influencing factors.The research showed that the theoretical framework of the epistemology of scientific argumentation established in this study was reasonable,and the test tool designing based on its instructional for measuring the development of high school student’s epistemology of scientific argumentation was high-quality.In addition,the development level of high school student’s the epistemology of scientific argumentation is generally well,and it will be influenced by the students,cognitive level,gender,and specific scientific argumentation situations.The first chapter of the dissertation was "Introduction",which mainly discusses the origin and problems of the study,current researches,the purpose and significance of the research,and the routines and methods of this study.The second chapter was "the Theoretical Basis".It talked about some key conceptions in this study,such as "scientific argumentation","the epistemology of scientific argumentation".Also,the theoretical framework of epistemology of scientific argumentation was constructed and discussed in detail.The third chapter was "Research Design".Based on the theoretical framework,the contextualized tasks,and the interview results,a questionnaire on the development of the epistemology of scientific argumentation was designed.Through applying item response theory,this questionnaire was revised and improved.In this chapter,the samples of the survey in each pilot test and final test were also introduced.The fourth chapter was "The Results".By using SPSS,the obtained data was analyzed and explained.The fifth chapter was "Conclusion and Reflection" All conclusions were summarized,and the research reflections and prospects were also elaborated.