Seeking the Trace of Argumentation in Turkish Science Curriculum

Providing students with inquiry-oriented learning environments is a major concern in science education. Argumentation discourse can enhance the effectiveness of inquiry-oriented learning environments. This study seeks the trace of argumentation in Turkish Elementary and Secondary Science Curriculum developed by the Turkish Ministry of Education (TME, 2013) with an emphasis on inquiry-based learning. The aim is to investigate learning outcomes that might be conducive to argumentation. For data analysis, latent content analysis was used, by means of which the researchers looked for the underlying meaning of the words in learning outcomes. The categorization framework was designed to include argumentation, the nature of science (NOS), content of the learning outcomes, domain of the learning outcomes, and the relationship between argumentation and the NOS. The results showed that the distribution of explicit and implicit argumentation elements, the NOS aspects, and socio-scientific issues are high in 4th and 5th grades. Argumentation elements exist explicitly or implicitly in all grades, but there is not a clear pattern in their distribution across grades. They occur more frequently in the domain of earth and space learning. The curriculum is promising as it includes argumentation to a certain extent, but improvements are nevertheless needed in future curriculum development processes.