2021 Volume 62 Issue 1 Pages 187-195
The purpose of this study is to clarify the effectiveness of a lesson designed by McNeill and Krajcik’s (2011) teaching strategies in improving argument construction skills based on appropriate and sufficient evidence, through a case study on “Magnetism created by electric current” in the 5th grade of elementary school. Yamamoto, Inagaki et al. (2013) tested the effectiveness of these teaching methods by conducting a case study on “dissolution of matter” in the same grade. This study is a new test of whether a lesson designed by utilizing these teaching strategies are effective in different units. A total of 65 children in two classes in the fifth grade were given a series of argumentation tasks before and after the unit. Analysis of the responses revealed that the children improved their argument construction skills in terms of the appropriateness of using only evidence to support their claims. It is also evident that the skills have improved, although partially, in terms of the sufficiency of using all the pieces of evidence necessary for the claim. However, at the same time, it was found that some of the sufficiency of the evidence did not improve much. A supplementary analysis of the selection of evidence shows that the selection of “indirect evidence” that must be analogous to the meaning of the experimental results is not always possible. Based on the above results, we can conclude that the lessons designed by using McNeill and Krajcik’s (2011) teaching strategies are effective in improving children’s argument construction skills based on appropriate and sufficient evidence from the unit “Magnetism created by electric current”. In addition, it could be considered that the lessons designed by the teaching strategies have room for improvement in terms of “teaching the argument multiple times within the unit” and “promoting the use of indirect evidence”.
