Young Children's Epistemic Operations and Emergent Argumentation in Inquiry-Based Discussions: The Role of Teacher Questioning and Collaborative Interactions

Abstract

Promoting argumentation based on evidence allows students to give meaning to the phenomena observed, enabling the construction of knowledge. Children's argumentative discourse can be activated by appropriate instruction, but there is little information on argumentation at early ages and there is a need for the teacher to understand how to foster and guide the articulation of ideas at this stage. In this study we aim to assess how teachers' dialogical practices stimulate young children to engage in argumentation and knowledge construction through simultaneously analyzing the teacher's questions and children's answers, from the double scope of the epistemic and argumentative operations. We analyzed elementary classroom discussions of students involved in inquiry activities on plant growth led by two different trainee teachers. Our results show that 6–7-year-olds were able to not only use experimental data and prior knowledge as evidence to generate explanations and draw conclusions but also evaluate and question the ideas of others. This gave rise to small argumentative nodes in which a process of co-construction of knowledge on plant growth and core concepts of the living being took place. We have identified three fundamental characteristics of the dialogical strategies that can condition the quality of the students' practice: the type of teacher's questions, the order or questioning sequence, and certain talk moves to manage correct or incorrect responses and to stimulate peer collaboration. Our results indicate that teachers could involve students in high-level epistemic operations but also implement appropriate dialogic techniques to raise the level of argumentation and scientific reasoning from an early age.