ABSTRACT
Several researchers have shown that student participation in discourse paralleling that of scientific communities is critical to successful science education. This study focuses on supporting scientific argumentation in the classroom through a personally-seeded online discussion system. Students use an online interface to build principles to describe data they have collected. These principles become the seed comments for the online discussions. The software sorts students into discussion groups with students who have built different principles so that each discussion group can consider and critique multiple perspectives. We outline a methodology for (a) coding the individual comments in terms of epistemic operation, grounds, and content normativity and (b) parsing and assessing overall argumentation structure of the oppositional episodes. This study therefore contributes to the research literature both in terms of scaffolding and assessing student argumentation in online asynchronous forums.
