ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ REASONİNG SKILLS: A META- ANALYSIS

Yurdagül BOĞARMiddle East Technical University, Elementary Science Education

INTRODUCTION/PROBLEMAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science (1998) and National Research Council (1996) emphasized helping students develop reasoning skills as a major goal for science education. The emphasis placed on reasoning in science teaching is two fold:

1) reasoning with evidence is a scientific

practice

2) researchers have found positive correlations

between student reasoning abilities and measures of learning

gains in science content (Coletta & Phillips, 2005;

Lawson et al. 2000; Shayer & Adey, 1993).

The purpose of this study is to conduct a metanalysis of studies of reasoning in the context of elementarty schools.

The literature shows that several efforts to support student reasoning in science classrooms have been undertaken with various levels of success (Carey et al., 1989; Driver et al., 1994; Tytler & Peterson, 2005).

In spite of the importance placed on students’ acquisition of reasoning skills, science educators have not conducted a through review of studies that focus on elementary students’ reasoning skills.

A review of the literature revealed that no meta-analysis study of elementary school students’ reasoning skills has been published in

recent years. Therefore, this study has an importance thorough review of relavent literature on elementary students’ reasoning skills.

DESIGN Before searching the literature, we determined the criteria for inclusion in our meta-analysis study.

Criterion 1: Studies must be conducted between 1980 and 2015.

Criterian 2: Studies must be concerned with elementary school students.

Criterian 3: Studies must be just selected from published articles.

SEARCH PROCEDURE The researcher conducted searches within several databases, including Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), Educational Abstracts, PsycINFO (via ProQuest), Exceptional Children Electronic Resources (ECER), and EBSCOHost. Descriptors entered into the search included combination of students’ reasoning skills, elementary students’ reasoning skills, reasoning skills in science education and elementary students’ reasoning skills in science education.

DATA SOURCESFourty-six articles that met all of the criteria and provided the requisite data for a meta-analysis were identified.

We defined the characteristics central to our meta-analysis study and analyzed the articles.

These characteristics are year of the study, authors, title of the study, source of the study, participants , purpose of the study and type of reasoning.

REFERENCESAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science. (1998).Benchmarks for science literacy. New York: Oxford University Press.Carey, S., Evans, R., Honda, M., Jay, E., & Unger, C. (1989). “An experiment is when you try it and see if it works”: A study of grade 7 students’ understanding of the construction of scientificknowledge. International Journal of Science Education, 11: 514-29.Coletta, V. P. & J.A. Phillips. (2005). “Interpreting FCI scores: Normalized gain, reinstruction scores, and scientific reasoning ability,” American Journal of Physics 73(12), 1172-1179. Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E., & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing scientific knowledge in the classroom. Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5–12.National Research Council (NRC), (1996). National science education standards.Washington, DC: National Academies Press.Tytler, R., & Peterson, S. (2004). From ‘‘Try It and See’’ to Strategic Exploration: Characterizing Young Children’s Scientific Reasoning. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41, 94–118

THEME-BASED REVIEW FINDINGS ON REASONINGReview of relevant articles yielded several themes related to reasoning. These include:

Our review resulted in 12 articles under scientific reasoning theme Our review resulted in 9 articles under analogical reasoning theme. Our review resulted in 4 articles under evidence-based reasoning theme. Our review resulted in 2 articles under statictical reasoning theme.

Theme One:Scientific Reasoning

Theme Two: Analogical Reasoning

Theme Three:Evidence-Based Reasoning

Theme Four:Statistical Reasoning

Themes

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS This meta-analysis examined 46 published articles that met the researchers’ criterion for elementary school students’ reasoning skills. In this study, we narratively reviewed four themes which were scientific reasoning,analogical reasoning, evidence-based reasoning and statictical reasoning. However, other themes which consisted of model-based, logical, mechanistic, abductive, retrodictive, verbal, and inferential reasoning were not discussed in this paper due to page limitations. However, these studies are represented in the Appendix. The results of this meta-analysis showed that most of the studies conducted between 1991 and 2014 on elementary school students’ reasoning skills were related to scientific reasoning. Most likely this is because of the popularity of inquiry-based learning and argumentation in recent years. The general results of these studies indicated that scientific reasoning levels of students who were engaged in inquiry activity were significantly higher than those who engage with science activities through traditional approach. Most of the studies reviewed in this appear that investigated elementary school students’ analogical reasoning were conducted between 1987 and 2014. In general, the findings of these studies emphasized that if educators are to be successful in helping their students to develop expert-like thinking skills, and improve their conceptual understanding, they need to help their students to develop analogical reasoning abilities. In addition, other studies that investigated elementary school students’ reasoning skills were related to evidence-based reasoning, statistical reasoning, model-based reasoning, logical, mechanistic, abductive, retrodictive, verbal, and inferential reasoning. However, they were very limited in numbers. More precisely, the context of these studies was mostly related to scientific reasoning and analogical reasoning. In considering the study results, we can say that elementary school students’ reasoning skills is continously developing area and has gained popularity among science educators.

This study has many implications for teaching and learning of science, developing and researching elementary school students’ reasoning skills in the future. Future studies can focus on middle school

students, high school students, college students, graduate students and teachers.