We are definitely familiar with Sue Doubler’s “Talk Science Project”. Her project definitely informed our work. I do think there is overlap, but ours focuses specifically on argumentation and it cuts across the modalities of talking, writing and reading.

We will be sharing the resources as stand alone as well. At the very end of the video there is a website listed – www.argumentationtoolkit.org – where we intend to provide the resources. But we are still definitely working on the design. Any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated.

We are really excited to make it public. If you have any suggestions at all about formatting or other aspects as wel design the website, please let us know!

Thanks very much Jeff!

I would actually love to know more about your thinking. Currently, all of the resources are embedded in a middle school curriculum, which includes specific lesson plans and associated resources to go along with the Activity Videos. We still need to think through what would be most useful in terms of sharing these resources on a stand alone website. Both of these suggestions are really interesting. If you have others, we would love to hear them.

Thanks Craig! Yes there is a lot of synergy between these projects.

Thanks! We’ll be looking at pre- and post-measures of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for argumentation. We also have back-end data about teachers’ access of the materials (page views of the curriculum materials, which videos they watched, how frequently) and teachers’ self-reports of curriculum use.

I think it would be fabulous to see it extended to the elementary level. We have not actually talked about that yet. I do think some of the teacher and student supports as they currently are would be helpful for upper elementary students. But it would be interesting to think about what else would be useful for elementary science.

Thanks so much! The 24 videos and other multimedia materials in the argumentation toolkit (www.argumentationtoolkit.org) are instruction tools, but for this project they are designed to be teacher-facing rather than student-facing. Each of our video categories play a different role in supporting teacher learning – the structure and design of the videos reflect this. For example, each category follows a consistent template so that videos within a category all accomplish the same goal. The question of storytelling is interesting! Although our videos are not narrative based, we do bring in expert teachers and students to share their experiences with viewers. Additionally, we explain concepts through animations with voice over.

We are running a study right now where the resources were embedded in a year long curriculum. Approximately 98 teachers are using the curriculum with half receiving the toolkit supports. We are collecting pre and post teacher belief and PCK measures for argumentation. In addition, our external evaluator is doing more in depth case studies on a subset of the teachers to see if the toolkit impacts teachers’ instructional strategies. We are not looking on student learning, but that would clearly be a really interesting next step depending on what we find this year.

We have not in the work this video talks about, but I think it is incredibly important. I had a doc student working with a BPS teacher around some socioscientific argumentation he was engaged with his students. The kids relied on a variety of types of justifications, including scientific evidence but other types of evidence as well. I will e-mail you 2 papers that came out of this work and you can see if it is helpful at all.