Curriculum materials support teachers in the promotion of argumentation in science teaching: A case study

This case study set out to explore the potential of curriculum materials to scaffold classroom argumentation in a primary-school science classroom in Chile. One teacher and thirty students participated in the study. The teacher was given curriculum materials especially designed to foster argumentation during the teaching of physics. Lessons were videotaped and classroom discourse analysed. The analyses show that the teacher was progressively able to promote argumentation, both in whole-class and group-work interactions, from lesson 1: argumentative interactions were increasingly responsive and engaging, and the teacher's group supervision was progressively argumentatively oriented. The implications for professional development are discussed herein.