JoinIncorporating Scientific Argumentation into Inquiry-Based Activities with Online Personally Seeded Discussions
The ability to engage in argumentation in order to construct, justify, and evaluate scientific explanations is seen by many as an important component of scientific literacy. In order to foster productive argumentation in science classrooms, the authors developed the Personally Seeded Discussion (PSD). The PSD is an online asynchronous discussion forum that automatically sorts participants into small groups based on the nature of students’ ideas. While in this forum, students have an opportunity to propose, justify, critique, and revise their ideas until they reach consensus.