Education Commons^™

Instructional Practices That Foster Argumentative Discourse In Secondary Science Classrooms, Alicia N. Herrera

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

To remain competitive in an innovative world, American classrooms are promoting careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by utilizing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Students are engaged in inquiry by applying scientific practices like argumentation. However, science teachers are finding it difficult to respond to, as well as deepen students’ argumentative conversations. Therefore, research must uncover what instructional practices (or combinations) are used to overcome classroom obstacles, along with fostering students’ discourse and sensemaking. A teacher research approach was taken to investigate how the researcher, a secondary science teacher herself, effectively combines three under-researched instructional practices for …

The Centrality Of Claim-Making In The Social Studies Classroom: Teaching For Claim-Making With The Persuasive Claim Framework, Ryan Anders Lewis

Theses and Dissertations--Curriculum and Instruction

This dissertation includes three articles that focus on the importance of claim-making and argumentative writing in social studies classrooms. Each article highlights various aspects of the claim-making process by introducing ways for teachers to help students write better claims, highlighting the importance of claim-making within the extant social studies literature, and analyzing the results of centering the claim-making process in a preservice teaching methods program.

Article One, “What’s in a Claim: A Framework for Helping Students Write Persuasive Claims?” (2021), is an article written for practicing teachers. As part of a larger discussion on the challenges of implementing the dimensions …