Analysis of students' argumentative discourse in a university Physics course

Authors

  • Ana Fleisner
  • Silvia Ramírez
  • Ma. Belén Sabaini

Keywords:

Argumentative discourse, Teaching physics, University students.

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze the argumentaive discourse of university students of a course of physics. We seek to establish a relationship between this discourse and the understanding of the contents of the discipline. The analysis of the response of 25 students to a written activity is performed, recognizing the basic components of the arguments, as well as the logical structure of the arguments. We use the models proposed by Toulmin, Van Dijk and Adam an we evaluate the relevance of the different argumentative components in relation to the required conceptual contents.
The results show that in most cases the main components of the argumentation patterns proposed by the models used are incomplete. Many of the students present conceptual misunderstandings. It can be concluded that there is a relationship between the conceptual and symbolic language of the discipline and the structure of argumentative discourse. The best–structured discourses turned out to be the ones that showed greater concep-tual understanding.

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Published

2017-11-02

How to Cite

Analysis of students’ argumentative discourse in a university Physics course. (2017). Journal of Physics Teaching, 29, 139-144. https://revistas.psi.unc.edu.ar/index.php/revistaEF/article/view/18454