Enhancing High School Students’ Critical Thinking Skills through Thought Experiments Based Online Argumentation in Science Education

The purpose of this research is to enhance high school students’ critical thinking skills through thought experiments based online argumentation in science education. The research was conducted with 11 ninth grade students educating at a high school in Ankara through an online group on the basis of case-study. During the online application, students reconstructed the thought experiments as arguments, criticized their own and others’ thinking strategies, presented counter-arguments against arguments. Online group argumentation and student process evaluation were used as data collecting tools and their content validity was checked by three science educators. The same educators’ coding and categorizing consistency, which was determined as 95 percentages, was used for reliability. Content analysis was utilized. At the end of the research, it was found that thought experiments based argumentation enhanced students’ critical thinking by the help of reconstruction the thought experiments as arguments, criticizing their own and others’ thinking strategies and presentation counter-arguments against others’ arguments.