International Journal of Science Education

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Organising a culture of argumentation in

elementary science

William A. Sandoval, Noel Enyedy, Elizabeth H. Redman & Sihan Xiao

To cite this article: William A. Sandoval, Noel Enyedy, Elizabeth H. Redman & Sihan Xiao (2019):
Organising a culture of argumentation in elementary science, International Journal of Science
Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500693.2019.1641856

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2019.1641856

Published online: 31 Jul 2019.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2019.1641856

Organising a culture of argumentation in elementary science

a
William A. Sandoval , Noel Enyedyb, Elizabeth H. Redmana and Sihan Xiao c

a
Department of Education, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; bPeabody College of Education,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA; cSchool of Education Science, East China Normal University,
Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Most of the research on argumentation in science education has Received 27 August 2018
documented the myriad flaws in students’ argumentation, and the Accepted 7 July 2019
difficulties teachers have organising productive arguments in the
KEYWORDS
classroom. We apply a sociocultural framework to argue that Argumentation; discourse;
productive argumentation emerges from a classroom culture in interaction analysis
which its practice meaningfully serves classroom goals. We
present a case study using interaction analysis to contrast two
elementary teachers’ efforts to organise productive scientific
argumentation in their classrooms. One teacher used discourse
moves to orient students to each other’s contributions in ways the
other did not, reflecting differences in underlying aims for
collective versus individual sense-making. This analysis shows that
connecting discourse practices specifically to a goal of collective
sense-making promotes productive argumentation.

Introduction
Interest in students’ learning to argue and arguing to learn has blossomed in science
education over the last two decades (Duschl, 2008), and in the United States it is pro-
minent in both new science education standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) and the
broader common core standards (CCSSO, 2010). Most of the research on argumenta-
tion in science education has documented the myriad flaws in students’ arguments
(McDonald & McRobbie, 2010), and the difficulties teachers have organising pro-
ductive arguments in the classroom (McNeill & Pimentel, 2010). Many efforts to
promote argumentation view it as a particular cognitive skill to be practised through
specific kinds of lessons (Cavagnetto, 2010). Here, we take the view that scientific argu-
mentation is a particular cultural practice and developing productive argumentation in
classrooms requires organising a culture in which the practice is meaningful. In this
paper, we contrast two elementary teachers’ efforts to organise and sustain productive
argumentation in their science teaching, in order to advance claims about what it
means to organise a culture of productive argumentation and what it requires. We
build on earlier work that demonstrates such a culture leads to children’s improved
understanding of practices of scientific argument (Ryu & Sandoval, 2012) to articulate

CONTACT William A. Sandoval sandoval@gseis.ucla.edu 2327 Moore Hall, School of Education & Information
Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

an instructional model for promoting the development of those practices in elementary

science.
The analysis presented in this paper began with the question, what are teachers doing
when they promote sustained argumentation over time? We set out to answer this ques-
tion by looking at classroom interactions in two teachers’ classrooms, teachers who had
been collaborating with us to introduce argumentation into their science instruction.
We found that these teachers organised opportunities for argumentation quite differently,
and these differences were consequential for the epistemic agency (Elgin, 2013) students
displayed. Our analysis thus turned to answer the question of just how these teachers’
practices differed and the consequences for students. Elgin argues that epistemic agents
assume responsibility for the aims, processes, and standards of knowledge production.
Students thus have epistemic agency to the extent that they are able to assume these
responsibilities. Our analysis examines how teachers promoted or limited such agency
through efforts to promote argumentation.

Theoretical framework
Science studies over the last half-century persuasively document the ways in which science
knowledge is inextricably tied to science practice (Latour & Woolgar, 1986). The knowl-
edge produced by any science is not independent of the methods of its production and
evaluation (Pickering, 1995). Consequently, learning science requires the coordination
of epistemic, cognitive, and social aspects as integrated, rather than distinct, parts of the
fabric of doing science (Duschl, 2008). Scientists themselves are not taught to argue as
a separate skill but appropriate the argumentative practices of their fields (Longino,
1990). This view of science practice has become so well accepted as to be codified in
the US’ NGSS (NGSS Lead States, 2013).
This view of science practice is consonant with sociocultural perspectives on cognition
(Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978) that situate learning as an aspect of everyday
activity occurring within particular communities of practice. A community of practice
is a construct for describing groups of people pursuing collectively shared goals. Such
goals are pursued through practices: ways of talking and acting that are enacted by com-
munity members according to shared norms attached to specific roles. Learning to argue is
thus situated within the broader activity of knowledge production, in which disagreements
may naturally arise and must be resolved (see Manz, 2014). Argumentation practices
emerge and evolve in order to achieve specific collectively shared goals. Instruction, there-
fore, must focus on providing a reason to argue, a goal that argumentation can meet, and
resources with which arguments can be resolved.
We use the term resources here to refer to material resources that participants can
mobilise to produce and critique arguments. Such resources include books or online
sources, experimental instruments and materials, inscriptions of empirical observations
or measurements, and so on. We prefer this term here over the more typical Vygotskian
notion of tool because Vygotsky considered talk one of the most important tools mediating
human activity (Vygotsky, 1962), and we wish to single out the role of talk in learning to
argue in relation to the material resources that are made available.
For our purposes, the material resources of interest are those things that become avail-
able for producing knowledge claims. A crucial kind of material resource is inscriptions:
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 3

charts, graphs, tables, diagrams, drawings, etc. (Latour, 1986). These can be firsthand, pro-
duced by students directly, such as a table of measurements. They can also be secondhand,
produced by others, even outside of the classroom, such as a map of tectonic plates or a
model of a human skeleton. They can even be thirdhand, descriptions or summaries of
other inscriptions that are not available themselves (such is often the case in textbooks).
Whether inscriptions are presented on paper or electronically, they are still material in
that they are available for direct sensing. Our concern here is not on the quality of
resources as they may be provided in the curriculum (cf., Larrain, Howe, & Freire,
2018) but on how available material resources are used in argument discourse.
One aspect of materiality important for our analysis is that material resources can be
possessed by one or more persons at any given time. Control over the material resources
invoked during an argument confers greater epistemic agency to the person(s) in control.
Furthermore, control of a material resource has implications for the interactions of indi-
viduals whose collective work involves that resource.

Productive disciplinary discourse

Productive arguments are a central aspect of productive disciplinary discourse. Engle and
Conant (2002) describe disciplinary engagement as productive when it includes four fea-
tures: students are engaged in the intellectual work of taking on and solving problems; stu-
dents have the authority to resolve problems; students are accountable to disciplinary
standards of resolution; and finally, as we have discussed, students have resources to
resolve the problems they encounter. One way of viewing argumentation in relation to
productive disciplinary engagement is that standards of accountability are primarily
what scientific argumentation is about. To what standards should claims, evidence, and
the means of their production be held accountable? Our view is that arguments are pro-
ductive when students explicitly grapple with these issues of accountability. The pro-
ductive disciplinary engagement framework suggests a way to see epistemic agency as
the distribution of authority and accountability as manifested through talk. Teacher talk
is crucial to scaffolding productive arguments in that it communicates to students who
actually has epistemic authority in the classroom: who gets to be in charge of knowledge
and knowledge standards.

Argumentation in science classrooms

The recognition of argumentation as an important discursive practice for learning science
goes back two decades (Driver, Newton, & Osborne, 2000). Despite this recognition,
organising productive argumentation as a consistent feature of science instruction is
rare (Larrain, Freire, & Howe, 2014; Naylor, Keogh, & Downing, 2007). Science teachers
across elementary and secondary levels do not usually have much experience in the prac-
tice themselves and seem not to understand it well (McNeill & Knght, 2013; Osborne,
Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, & Richardson, 2013; Sampson & Blanchard,
2012). These studies and more (Evagorou & Dillon, 2011; Zembal-Saul, 2009) suggest
that learning to teach science through argumentation requires shifting discourse practices
in the classroom such that students not only share their thinking but also engage with each
other’s ideas productively and with accountability. Superficial uptake of instructional
4 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

strategies for argumentation can produce ‘pseudoargumentation’ (Berland & Hammer,

2012; McNeill, González-Howard, Katsh-Singer, & Loper, 2017), where students fail to
really engage productively or accountably. This amplifies the importance of teacher talk
moves being tied to, and deployed for, goals of accountability (Ghousseini, Beasley, &
Lord, 2015; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012).
Conversational frames (Goffman, 1974) refer to how people understand the aims of the
conversation they are in. They are a dynamic interactional accomplishment, as interlocu-
tors respond to each other as they talk. Hammer and colleagues have used frame analysis
to show that how teachers frame the purpose of an activity influences how students inter-
act with material resources, like worksheets (Rosenberg, Hammer, & Phelan, 2006), and
specifically classroom arguments (Berland & Hammer, 2012). Berland, in particular, has
contrasted frames of sense-making and persuasion as differentially likely to promote
good arguments, with persuasion being preferred (Berland & Reiser, 2009, 2011). In con-
trast, Garcia-Mila and colleagues instructed dyads to either try to persuade each other or
come to a consensus, and students in the consensus group wrote better arguments
(Garcia-Mila, Gilabert, Erduran, & Felton, 2013).
Reaching consensus can require forms of persuasion, of course, but one difference
between consensus and persuasion as frames for arguments is that consensus requires a
collective effort. The value of a collective frame has been suggested by earlier work
showing that collective inquiry over a school year can lead to students’ appropriation of
productive argument discourse (Ryu & Sandoval, 2012; Lehrer, Schauble, & Lucas,
2008; Mercer, 2009). Our case extends this work by showing specifically how particular
teacher talk moves function more and less effectively to promote argumentation depend-
ing upon whether the arguments are framed as collective or individual problems.
While argumentation has been singled out as an especially important epistemic dis-
course in science learning, a long history of work on dialogic teaching suggests the
value of particular forms of teacher talk in promoting student dialogue with accountabil-
ity. While Engle and Conant (2002) frame accountability in terms of disciplinary stan-
dards, enacting that form of accountability requires students to be accountable to each
other. Work specifically on ‘accountable talk’ (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008)
highlights specific teacher moves to promote students talking to and with each other,
rather than simply to and through the teacher. A crucial move is teachers’ pressing stu-
dents to elaborate on and justify their reasoning (cf., Kazemi & Stipek, 2001). Justification,
especially justifying claim-evidence relations, is a crucial aspect of arguments (McNeill,
Lizotte, Krajcik, & Marx, 2006; Sandoval & Millwood, 2005). When teachers prompt stu-
dents to justify their thinking, their argumentation improves (Ryu & Sandoval, 2012;
Larrain et al., 2018; Mercer, 2009). Our case study builds on this work by showing how
the same talk moves used in a collective frame push students to elaborate and justify
their thinking more than an individualistic frame.

Methods
Our analysis draws from a multi-year collaboration between university researchers and
teachers at a laboratory school on the university campus, in a large metropolitan area
in the western United States. The student population of the school, during the time of
our project, was approximately 38% Caucasian, 19% Latino, 7% Asian American, 6%
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 5

African American, and 30% multiethnic. The school is organised into multi-grade bands
such that students have the same set of teachers for two years. In this project, we worked
with the third/fourth-grade level, mainly with Ms. Brown and Ms. Green (pseudonyms).
The science curriculum rotated on a bi-annual schedule so that students did not repeat the
same science material. Ms. Brown had been teaching for 5 years at the start of our work
together, all at this school, and had a Ph.D. in education. Ms. Green had been teaching for
36 years, all at this school, and had a BA in English, although she had taught science for
many years. Ms. Brown taught a group of 58 children with 2 other teachers, teaching
science to groups of 26 students at one time, 2–3 days per week. Ms. Green taught an
intact class of 22 students and taught science also 2–3 days per week.
All of the teachers and researchers met nearly every week of the school year for two
years and spent approximately two weeks each summer planning for the upcoming
school year. These meetings were focused on identifying places in the teachers’ existing
curricula to introduce opportunities for argumentation. This included creating or expand-
ing students’ opportunities for empirical investigation to make data available as resources
for resolving science questions. We also introduced activity structures intended to put stu-
dents’ ideas into opposition with each other, particularly encouraging teachers to ask stu-
dents to explain their reasoning and to distinguish between their claims about some topic
and their reasons for believing those claims. These reasons sometimes, of course, included
evidence but not always.
We compare here how the two teachers taught the same unit on the human musculos-
keletal system (FOSS, 2005). This was the first science unit of the school year and lasted in
each class for about 6 weeks. The aim of the unit was for students to understand how many
bones are in the body, how they are organised, how muscles, tendons, and ligaments attach
to the skeletal structure, and how this system works to make the body move. The team
decided to add a capstone activity in which students would build functional models of
a joint of their choosing (i.e. show how the joint moves), inspired by an instructional
activity developed by Penner, Giles, Lehrer, and Schauble (1997). We chose this unit
for analysis because it was the first major science unit of the year for each teacher and
thus the context in which classroom norms were established, negotiated, and routinised.
Our data come from video records of instruction collected from Ms. Brown’s and Ms.
Green’s classrooms. We focus on whole-class discussions and look specifically at how each
teacher organised argumentation in their classroom during the musculoskeletal unit. We
focus on whole-class discussions because they are the place where students’ individual and
joint activity becomes public and collective. Where small groups were trying to develop
their own interpretations or explanations from some activity, whole-class discussions
were the place where these were publicly compared, evaluated, and resolved into a
single class-wide explanation. Consequently, whole-class discussions are the site where
classroom culture becomes clearly evident. We identified approximately 290 min of
whole-class discussion in Ms. Brown’s class, out of 11 h on this unit from October
through early January, and 206 min out of about 9 h of instruction in Ms. Green’s class
over the same period.
Data were analysed using interaction analysis methods (Erickson, 1992; Jordan & Hen-
derson, 1995). Each videotaped lesson was logged, marking the major segments of activity
in the lesson (Erickson, 1992, 2006), particularly to bound whole-class discussion seg-
ments. Segments were examined to identify episodes of arguments, determined if there
6 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

was overt disagreement among students over some aspect of their science work. We follow
Manz (2014) in viewing arguments as arising in any aspect of science activity, not just dis-
agreements about causal explanatory claims and the evidence for them. Students could
argue, for example, about how to do things, what data they needed, or which claim
made the most sense. These disagreements sometimes arose spontaneously among stu-
dents, and sometimes the teacher elicited multiple points of view from students in
order to initiate an argument. Each argument episode was transcribed, and particular
teacher utterances were coded in terms of their function in the discourse. What were tea-
chers prompting students to talk about? How did they respond to student input? How did
they put students in dialogue with each other? How did these moves promote argumenta-
tion? How did teacher talk moves, and students’ subsequent responses, function in relation
to the material resources deployed during discussions? Arguments ended either when dis-
agreements were explicitly resolved or when the attempt to resolve them petered out. We
began by coding Ms. Green’s episodes because we had a sense from the prior analysis that
she was successful at promoting productive argumentation (Ryu & Sandoval, 2012). We
then applied these codes to Ms. Brown’s classroom to compare their whole-class argu-
ments. These codes are presented in the “Findings” section.
Our analysis of the use of material resources in arguments is limited to the artefacts
deployed in the videos. These included inscriptions either provided to students or con-
structed by them – charts, photos, diagrams, graphs, tables, and physical models. This
analysis is not yet as systematic as our analysis of talk, with discrete, identifiable
‘moves’ made with inscriptions. Rather, we examine features of their use that are conse-
quential for the construction of epistemic authority. Who uses them? This concerns not
only who talks about them but also who physically possesses them. What status are
inscriptions granted, are they objectified as ‘the answer’ or can they be argued over?
The possession and epistemic status of inscriptions figure into the location of epistemic
authority.

Findings
We organise our findings in two parts. First, we compare Ms. Brown and Ms. Green in
their use of specific talk moves we identified as consequential for student argumentation.
This comparison shows similarities in the language used by both teachers but highlights
differences in how the same talk functioned in each classroom. Following this, we
compare the same whole-class discussion as it occurred in each classroom to show differ-
ences in how the teachers positioned themselves, students, and available material resources
that produced differences in the location of epistemic authority in the classroom.

Patterns of argument-promoting teacher moves

Both Ms. Brown and Ms. Green organised whole-class discussions with a high level of
student participation. The questions both teachers asked were open-ended, and many stu-
dents participated in discussions. Ms. Brown and Ms. Green used many of the talk moves
identified with ‘accountable talk’ (Michaels & O’Connor, 2012; Michaels et al., 2008). They
elicited students’ ideas, pressed students to elaborate on their reasoning, and solicited
differing viewpoints. Yet, Ms. Green also frequently used a range of talk moves that
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 7

Table 1. Teacher talk moves that promote student argumentation.

Teacher talk move Description
Press for consensus (PC) Questions or comments that push class towards consensus
Press for persuasion (PP) Identify competing ideas and press students to convince each other
Re-voice methods/criteria Listen for and label student-generated means for persuasion, or criteria for evidence,
(RM) believability, and so on
Focus epistemic issue (FI) Moves that re-orient class to the dispute they are trying to resolve

promoted sustained argumentation among students, described in Table 1. We also

observed Ms. Brown using each of these talk moves, but much less frequently, and
differently.
We do not suggest that these four moves are the only teacher talk important for promot-
ing and managing productive discussion, but they play particular roles in promoting pro-
ductive arguments. Press for consensus frames the aim of collective discussion as reaching
a mutually agreed-upon resolution. Press for persuasion orients students to figure out
what kinds of reasons are persuasive. While the concept of re-voicing includes the teacher
checking back with the student that a re-voiced comment is correctly interpreted
(O’Connor & Michaels, 1996), we focus here on how teachers re-voice students’ bids for
specific methods or criteria for persuasion. Finally, the epistemic focus move captures
instances where the teacher re-orients students to the disagreement they are trying to resolve.
The counts of talk moves show that Ms. Green was much more explicit about generat-
ing consensus in her discussions than Ms. Brown. This is evident in both the large differ-
ences in the frequency of talk moves and in which moves were more common. Ms. Brown
uttered a total of 41 of these argument-promoting moves over 290 min of discussion, for a
rate of about one such move every 6 min. By contrast, Ms. Green uttered one of these
moves 136 times in about 206 min of discussion, for a rate of 1 less than every 2 min.
As we will show, it is not that Ms. Green spoke more often during whole class discussions
than Ms. Brown, but that when she did speak it was to sustain students’ arguments.
The graph in Figure 1 also suggests differences in each teacher’s role in these discus-
sions. Most of Ms. Brown’s moves focused on re-voicing a student’s bid for a particular
method or criterion for evaluating a claim or a piece of evidence. These re-voicing
efforts were used to validate students’ contributions to the discussion and to promote
the class’ understanding of the point made. Ms. Green used this sort of re-voicing simi-
larly, but she also spent a considerable amount of time pressing students to decide if
they agreed or disagreed with one anothers’ claims and urged students to think about
how to persuade each other in an effort to resolve disagreements. For Ms. Green, the
point of discussion was to surface and resolve disagreements such that all students
could agree on a consensus answer. Ms. Brown, as we will show below, used discussions
to surface students’ thinking and guide it towards the canonical right answer, without
pressing for class consensus.
To highlight the differences in how each teacher organised a specific argumentative
culture, we compare the same discussion as it played out in each classroom. The discus-
sion followed group work to count bones in parts of the body and was intended to con-
solidate those group counts into a single count of all the bones in the body. This appears
to be a fairly straightforward question of fact. Within the FOSS unit, however, the ques-
tion of how many bones people have emerges from a more fundamental question of how
8 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

Figure 1. Number of argument-guiding talk moves for Ms. Brown and Ms. Green during whole-class
discussions in the musculoskeletal unit.

the body moves. Students were asked to jump and hop and run, and pay attention to
how their bodies move and to ask what enables a movement like a hop or a jump. Decid-
ing that their muscles enable movement led to the question of what muscles are con-
nected to – bones. The eventual aim was that students would explore, at least
superficially, the biomechanics involved in the movement. The question of how many
bones are in the body arose out of initial explorations of movement and students’ felt
experiences of their muscles enabling them to move. They were encouraged to try to
count their own bones to see the problem in this method for coming to a complete
count of bones and a view of how bones connect to form the skeleton. To try to
come to a fuller count, students were put in groups of two or three children who
were then assigned to count the number of bones in regions of the body, using large
laminated charts provided in the FOSS kit. Thus, in each class, at least two groups
counted the bones from specific charts showing the leg and foot, the arm and hand,
the torso (including the spine), and the skull. While the number of bones in the body
may seem like a straightforward factual matter, a quick internet search will reveal
quite a variety of bone counts for parts of the body, as sources seem to differ on
what, for example, they consider to be bones of the foot versus bones of the ankle,
and so on. The charts used in this example start at the femur and proceed down to
the toes. By that reckoning, there are 30 bones in each leg, 60 altogether. As will be
seen below, the distal phalanges at the tips of each toe can be quite hard to see as distinct
bones on some representations. Interpreting these charts presented epistemic challenges.

A productive argument over how to count

Ms. Green uses this problem to orchestrate a sustained argument over method. As framed
by Manz (2014), the argument emerged out of children’s efforts to stabilise their collective
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 9

position on two contested claims: (1) how many bones are in the human leg and foot and
(2) what is the best way to resolve discrepant counts?
This episode begins after each group has recorded their count for their assigned area of
the body on a sticky note, and the notes have been put upon butcher paper hung on the
whiteboard at the front of the class. Groups have arrived at different counts for the various
parts of the body. Ms. Green thus begins a discussion to resolve the discrepant counts. In
the excerpts that follow, speech is presented nearly verbatim, with some cleaning up to
enhance readability without changing the meaning of what is said. Transcript symbols
indicating re-starts, interruptions, overlapping speech, and other prosodic elements are
from Jefferson (2004). We have appended a column to each transcript to note where
we coded particular talk moves. The subject of the discussion in both teachers’ classrooms
is obtaining an accurate count of the bones in the human leg, using a chart shown in
Figure 2.
The episode begins with Ms. Green pointing out that the groups who have counted the
leg bones have come up with very different numbers and prompting for resolution. Stu-
dents are sitting at rows of tables facing the whiteboard at the front of the room. Ms.
Green is standing just in front of the tables, off to the side. Everyone is looking at the
sticky notes on the butcher paper and right from the beginning, the students make the

Figure 2. Chart of leg bones used by students (Copyright © The Regents of the University of California,
used with permission from FOSS, 2005).
10 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

material inscriptions central to their efforts to construct the criteria for convincing each
other.
1 Ms. G: ((standing at the left side of the room)) How could (2.5s) one of – somebody in either Carlos’ – PP
in the 52 bones group convince somebody in the 62 bones group that your number is right?
(1s) Or, is there anybody who can convince any of these people to change (3s) the numbers?
(4s) ((several hands go up during pause)) How could you convince someone? How could you
change their mind? Ben?
2 Ben: Can I use one of the charts you gave out yesterday?
3 Ms. G: Sure.
4 Ben: [Inaudible comment]
5 Ms. G: You want the leg one?
6 Ben: Yeah.
7 Ms. G: Was there something about the leg? ((moves to another side of the room)) FI
8 Ben: The leg –
9 Ms. G: Go on up Ben.
((Ben walks to the front of the room. Ms. G joins him with a stack of charts, selects leg chart, and
posts it on the whiteboard. Rest of class watches silently. Ms. G then returns to the left side of
the room.))
10 Ben: There’s a few things that you could have gotten wrong or mistaken on this chart, because here
((pointing at a top view of the foot)) it shows a different picture than there ((pointing to the
side view of the leg)), and usually it’s only showing the back of the foot. So, I saw other
pictures that they show the back of the hand like that ((rotating outstretched right arm)) and
it confused it, and we weren’t sure if it was this part ((taps inside of forearm)) or this part
((taps outside of forearm)) that we should count. (6s). Sara?

Ms. Green starts by asking the members of the groups that disagree how they could
convince the other group to change their count, and then opens up the opportunity to
‘anybody.’ Although she asks four separate questions, we code this as one press for persua-
sion, since she really provides only one opportunity to respond. Ms. Green immediately
frames the purpose of the discussion as figuring out a general way to resolve the discrepant
counts, rather than just solving this discrepancy. She asks, ‘How could you convince
someone?’ rather than tasking Ben to actually convince the other group.
Notice that Ben gets up from his chair and comes to the front of the room to address his
peers, while Ms. Green moves off to the side to cede him the floor. Ms. Green also fetches
the material resource, the leg chart, that Ben requests to make his point and puts it on the
board. This makes it available for everyone to see. As Ms. Green moves back to the side of
the room, Ben now has control of the leg chart. He does not actually engage Ms. Green’s
question directly. Rather, he proposes a cause for the discrepant counts: the difficulty of
moving between perspectives, in this case between the top and side views of the foot,
and having to choose from which view to count. That is, he attributes the potential
mistake of any group to the inadequacy of the inscription. He does not argue that the
right count is 52 but that, ‘it confused it.’
There is a long pause after Ben finishes, during which a few students raise hands. Ben
calls on Sara.
11 Sara: I mean, well, I agree with him, and //
12 Ms. G: //Real loud, Sara, because we’ve got all these fans and people in the back need to hear what
you’re saying.
13 Sara: I agree with him, um even though I’m supposed to be– I agree with him because sometimes–
can I come up as well? ((She comes to the front to bone chart; Ben moves a few feet to the
side)) Sometimes you might get confused. Right here ((pointing at the top view)) you can
count these bones, but they kind of left one out ((gesturing to the side view)), that’s one of
these. So maybe you guys kind of miscounted and [inaudible].
14 Ms. G: All right. Well, one group had 26 – thank you, Sara and Ben. I think you made a good point. RM
[Crosstalk]
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 11

15 Ms. G: One minute.

[Crosstalk]
16 Ms. G: You disagree with who?
17 Emmy: Ben and Sara.
18 Ms. G: Then why don’t you come up and talk to the class? PC
19 Emmy: Because this –
20 Ms. G: Come up to the front and talk to the class.
21 Emmy: This poster kind of shows both sides of the picture, because here, this bone here is probably
kind of somewhere in the back. So, it doesn’t really – I don’t think – I think it shows these
from both sides. Because as you can see, this one, this bone’s kind of turned.
22 Ms. G: Well, I mean, you – your group said that there was one ankle bone. Do you want to show us the FI
one you were talking about? And the other – the – no, you’re the – yeah, the 62 group said –
oh, I see what your difference is. You said 26 bones in the foot and the 52 bone group said 21
bones. So, that’s five bones difference. You want to show us the 26 bones you counted in the
foot?
23 Ben: Wait – who was the person counting?
24 Ms. G: I don’t know. ((to Emmy)) Just show it to us. You’re talking about the chart. PP

Several things are worth noting about this segment. One is how active participation in
the argument expands. First, Sara asks to come to the front, where she clarifies Ben’s point
about perspective by shifting it back to the leg chart and pointing specifically at how the
top view of the foot shows the end of the tibia and fibula, whereas the side view shows only
one of those bones. Then, Ms. Green invites Emmy to the front after she notices Emmy
disagrees with her classmates. Emmy’s basic disagreement with Ben and Sara is that the
multiple views do not present a problem, but in fact enable one to see all of the bones
in the leg. Participation expands in part because students have the agency to agree or dis-
agree with previous comments and because the teacher validates students when they do so.
Besides managing the active participants in the argument, Ms. Green’s participation in
the discussion is strategically limited to moves that encourage the children to explain and
resolve their disagreements. First, she validates Ben and Sara for making a ‘good point’
about the problem of perspective, signalling to the class it is a problem to be taken
seriously. It is possible, in fact, that her validation prompts Emmy to voice her own dis-
agreement. She then presses Emmy to ‘talk to the class’ to move towards consensus and to
‘show it to us’ to persuade her classmates of her point. In between these press moves, Ms.
Green reminds everyone that they are trying to resolve the specific issue of the different
counts and connects this instance to the larger epistemic issue of how to count using
these charts.
Following Ms. Green’s demand to ‘show it to us,’ Emmy proceeds to count the bones of
the foot out loud, using her finger to keep track as she goes. Ms. Green then asks someone
from a different group to come up and show the class how they counted the same bones.
She invites Carlos to come to the front, Sara returns to her seat, and Ms. Green asks Ben to
return to his seat as well. As he does, Ms. Green again re-voices his methodological point
as ‘sometimes looking at these pictures is a little confusing … because sometimes you’re
getting a different count depending on the view.’ Carlos comes up to rebut Ben’s point.
25 Carlos: I disagree, kind of, with Ben because I know that there’s only one layer of bones in your hands,
so it doesn’t matter if you see it.
26 Ms. G: Well, you know what? Let me– let me look– ((looking through bone charts))
[Crosstalk]
27 Carlos: So, it doesn’t matter if you see it upside down or right side up.
28 Ms. G: Ben, come on up and show them. Let’s finish them – no, wait, Carlos, let me show you what FI
he’s talking about. ((walking to the front of the room with a chart))
29 Ben: With the hand?
12 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

30 Ms. G: Yeah.
31 Ben: Ah. Oh, there.
32 Ms. G: Here’s – he has a point. ((lifting arm and hand chart to whiteboard)) FI
33 Ben: Um –
34 Ms. G: Here, let me – I’ll put it over here. And we don’t need the [inaudible]. We’re putting that like
this ((arranges papers hanging from whiteboard so that arm/hand chart is next to the leg/
foot chart)). Okay. Go ahead.
35 Ben: Right in– Carlos, can you move? Right here in the wrist, if you counted these it would be one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight ((counting view of the wrist from rotating palm up)).
Eight bones here. But if you go down here you counted one, two, three, four, five, six, seven
((counting view of the wrist from top of hand)). There’s seven bones. There’s seven bones
here and eight bones here.
36 Ms. G: How can that be? So, Ben, show them why that is. PP
37 Ben: Because one part of your hand is like this ((rotates right palm up)). So, the other part is like that
((rotates right-hand palm down)). So, you’re counting this part and it may have seven, and
this may have eight. So, how are you supposed to tell which one’s right?
38 Ms. G: Carlos, has he convinced you? PC
39 Carlos: Not really. Because the bottom of the hand– whichever has the more number is the one you
want. The more //
40 Ms. G: //Is the one you want. But he’s – but //
41 Carlos: //So, it’s easy with that one.
42 Ms. G: Right. But all Ben was saying is– what, Ben? RM
43 Ben: That there could be one here and you guys could have gone with a different one.
44 Ms. G: Right. But //
45 Ben: And then //
46 Ms. G: //And Carlos, you’re saying then – if that’s the case then you could count the – RM
47 Carlos: The larger one. Since that will have more bones.
48 Ms. G: Okay. Thank you, Ben. ((Ben returns to his seat))
49 Carlos: And before we counted, well, //
50 Ms. G: //Talk to them// ((gesturing to rest of class)) PP
51 Carlos: // we just counted //
52 Ms. G: //Because I know Diego is paying attention.
53 Carlos: To really show you what we did I need a skeleton. But– well, that’s what I counted, anyways.
But we all agreed. We just counted and we get, say, 60– or some kind of number, you know?
54 Ms. G: So, you didn’t use this picture.
55 Carlos: So, we’d count and then we’d recount and then we’d count again and we’d keep track of it, and
whatever number we got the most often would be the one. So, we just counted and
recounted and got a lot.

Carlos argues that there is ‘only one layer of bones’ so when confronted with conflicting
perspectives the accurate choice is to choose the view that shows the most bones. Ms.
Green pushes Carlos to acknowledge Ben’s assertion about the source of error and then
ratifies his method to resolve the error. Carlos then goes on, in the last turn above, to
suggest a method of recounting several times and use the number ‘we got the most
often.’ In other words, Carlos suggests the mode as the most accurate number to take
as the count of bones.
To make a long story short, Carlos’ assertion to use the mode is immediately challenged
by two students. Diego argues that ‘the number that you get the most might not be
correct.’ Emmy agrees and extends this critique to the difficulty presented by getting
two different quantities the same number of times.
56 Emmy: So, just adding to Diego, it’s not always right. Because maybe – if you count a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot,
and you – it’s possible that you could get 10 different numbers, or you could have three – one count that
has three times, one count that has three times too – like, three exactly the same, so you have no clue
what you have to do.

When Ms. Green presses Emmy and Diego to resolve this issue, they choose to count
the bones again. After a few stops and starts, Ms. Green gets the entire class to count out
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 13

loud while Diego tracks each bone on the chart at the front of the room. By producing a
collective count, the class reaches a consensus that there are 30 bones in one leg, 60
altogether. Importantly, Carlos independently retrieves a text that shows a precise view
of foot bones to support his claim that the distal phalanges are separate bones. As
alluded to above, Carlos and his group mates used the FOSS chart provided, a half-
scale skeleton model in Ms. Green’s room, and this book to corroborate their count.
The time from Ms. Green’s opening press for persuasion to Emmy’s contribution above
was about 9 min, and Ms. Green allowed the counting and discussion to continue for
more than 10 more minutes until she was satisfied that students agreed on the numerical
count.
We see three important features of this discussion to emphasise. First, Ms. Green
frames the discussion in terms of the epistemic problem of ‘how to convince’ another
group that you are right and only later asks the students to achieve one consensus
count. Furthermore, she limits her role in helping the children keep track of the progress
of the discussion and to maintain their focus. A key attribute of Ms. Green’s participation
is to keep children accountable to each other. She repeatedly orients speakers to their class-
mates, rather than to her, sending the message both verbally and visually that it is each
other they have to persuade not her. She uses re-voicing to make sure everyone in the
class understands key discussion points, and she insists that Carlos acknowledge Ben’s
point before moving onto his own. Lastly, Ms. Green takes care to make the bone
charts under discussion visually available to the whole class and physically available to
the students who come to the front to talk. These students are able to touch and
gesture over the charts as they make their points, adding to their epistemic authority.
Consequently, the children are really the authors of the discussion, as they introduce
every substantive point. While Ms. Green never explicitly asks them to come to a consen-
sus, her talk moves collectively suggest the need to achieve one. More importantly, she
does not impose the terms by which they have to agree. Rather, she grants them the auth-
ority to devise these terms, insisting only that they must reach consensus on them. It is
evident in these excerpts that children have appropriated at least some norms of joint
accountability, as they name, with little prompting, with whom they agree and disagree.

A discussion of the number of bones in the body

Now, we present the same discussion about bone counts as it occurred in Ms. Brown’s
class. Ms. Brown also used some of the same talk moves as Ms. Green, but we will
show they functioned differently in her class discussion. We interpret this functional
difference as representing a difference in the location of epistemic authority in the two
classrooms.
The discussion starts when Ms. Brown calls the class to come together after their group
work. Groups of students are holding the laminated charts they have been working with.
Ms. Brown had a very large classroom and often convened discussions on a rug in the
middle left side of the room. Rather than use a whiteboard, she used a portable easel to
enable public sharing of ideas and artefacts. On the easel is a chart similar to the one
on Ms. Green’s whiteboard, with post-it notes showing the counts of various body areas
produced by different groups. Ms. Brown’s chart, however, has a column where the
class has already recorded an average count of each area. This average was computed
14 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

and recorded by Ms. Brown prior to convening the class for discussion. Ms. Brown sits in a
chair next to the easel as students are seating themselves on the floor.
1 Ms. B: Okay. There have been some debates I’ve been hearing, and I really want to see how we’re solving them. ((as
she speaks, several students are walking across the rug, looking for places to sit)) The hand people – sit
down with your group. Shh. The arm people, sorry. There was a debate you had. Please talk to me about the
debate. Calvin.
2 Calvin: Uh, the //
3 Ms. B: //Skull people, over here. ((extending her right arm out to the side))
4 Calvin: Well //
5 Ms. B: //((standing up)) I’m going to ask that those of you that are sitting here stop talking. I can’t even believe that
this is how much I have to talk to you about this. I asked Will and his group a question. Turn your bodies to
face them. Now. Here, ((taking a chart from Will)) let me hold that so you can discuss it. Come on up. ((she
sits down and holds arm chart in front of her, facing students on the floor))

Ms. Brown frames the discussion as a report of debates she has heard among groups
and how these debates were resolved. Ms. Brown calls on the arm group because she
noticed that they encountered a problem and she liked how they solved it. The boys’
responsibility here is thus to report on the nature of the problem they encountered,
their resolution and their process for reaching a resolution. None of these things,
however, is framed as a collective concern of the class. Another thing to note is how
the arm chart is appropriated by Ms. Brown to support her effort to help the children
make clear the point she wants them to make about their counting. Two boys, Will and
Mac, come and stand next to Ms. Brown.
6 Ms. B: All right, Will. Tell us about the debate.
7 Will: This one ((gesturing to the exploded view of hand)) has that one ((pointing to bone)). And this
one ((pointing to another view of the wrist)) doesn’t have//
8 Ms. B: //Okay, so this//
9 Mac: //So //
10 Ms. B: //Say it louder.
11 Mac: This little bone right here, right there– right there, that one ((placing finger on bone in the
exploded view)) – this one, there’s no – that’s not there ((placing finger on the wrist in
another view)). In other words, this //
12 Will: //This one has seven bones showing//
13 Mac: //This is probably under these two bones right here. //
14 Ms. B: //Okay. So, wait. Hold on. Hold on. So, here’s the dilemma that they faced. When they looked at RM
what’s called the exploded diagram they counted more bones than here ((pointing towards
arm view)). ((to Mac)) Back up this way because then they can’t see. Back up, back up. Okay?
Now, my question is: You came up to this problem; what is your solution?

Will and Mac describe the same problem of counting wrist bones that Ben raised in Ms.
Green’s class. Here, Ms. Brown interrupts their description to clarify and summarise it for
the class, before Will or Mac have really had a chance to clarify, or before anyone else in
the class has had a chance to respond. Moreover, while Ms. Brown orients the discussion
to the entire group, by asking them to ‘tell us’ about their debate and to speak louder, this is
not in service of any identified collective problem. In essence, Ms. Brown spends less time
discussing the problem in detail and having the students agree on exactly what the
problem is. Instead, she re-interprets what the problem is for the students and encourages
the students to work on solving that problem.
Ms. Brown then asked the third boy in the group, and the one she originally called
upon, Calvin, to describe their solution. Calvin joins Will and Mac at the front of the
group, next to Ms. Brown, but rather than talk to the class whispers to Mac. Mac then
explains their resolution.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 15

15 Mac: The exploded diagram shows all the bones in your hand as a scrunched up diagram, right there, when
the bones are all scrunched up in their normal positions. Some bones might be under others that we
only see in the exploded diagram.
16 Will: And you can //
17 Ms. B: //What do you guys think? Those of you that // PC
18 Will: //And it’s true because you can feel the bones.
19 Ms. B: Oh, so he says he proved it by feeling it. So, let’s see, you guys. Start feeling your wrist. PC
20 Mac: Okay. So, lift up your right hand. Well, I’ll be the mirror just to show you. So, right here is the bone that
was missing in the scrunched up diagram. Right here.
21 Calvin: It’s the other side.
22 Mac: No, this is –
23 Ms. B: It doesn’t matter. Both sides are the same. Left side and right side All right the same. Yes. So, these RM
boys explained that – see this arm? Look, I’m going to put my arm like this arm. See? See this arm
right here? Look here. Stand back here with me? Okay? Like so. What they’re saying is that when you
flip my hand like this there’s actually a bone over here that can’t be seen if you’re looking at my ‘x-
ray.’

Mac seems to suggest that the solution is to use the exploded view of the hand, although
he does not make this clear. Ms. Brown asks the class what they think, although when Will
interrupts to say ‘you can feel the bones,’ she asks the class to feel their wrists rather than
consider Mac’s point about the diagram. As Mac, Will, and Ms. Brown start to raise their
hands to feel their wrists, Ms. Brown then orients the class to the arm/hand diagram,
which she has been holding this entire time. She bends her right arm out to her side to
mimic the diagram, and then, again, summarises the problem.
Overall, Ms. Brown uses similar talk moves to Ms. Green, with the exception of her ten-
dency to take longer turns to summarise and re-interpret what the students have said.
What is different is the overall pattern of how these specific turns are used. Ms. Brown
often uses the same type of moves to control the class narrative towards solving the
problem she wants, rather than to invite students into a discussion with each other
about what the problem is. On the one hand, these moves may validate particular contri-
butions: asking everyone to feel their wrists validates Will’s offer of proof that the bone in
the exploded view can be felt. On the other hand, the class previously decided days before
to count from charts because of the difficulty of feeling one’s skeleton, and there is no
opportunity here for a discussion of the relative merits of trying to feel through the
skin or count from the charts or coordinate them. In particular, Ms. Brown, here and
in the first excerpt above, uses extensive paraphrasing to control the substance of the
problem under discussion, while still allowing agency for the students around the solution.
Ms. Brown then asks the class if they accept Mac’s explanation. Several children raise
their hands, and Ms. Brown calls on Anna who seems to remain unclear about which view
Mac proposes to use. Mac repeats his explanation, gesturing frequently between his own
wrist and the chart held by Ms. Brown, and finally clarifies that you need the ‘palm view’ of
the skeleton to see the otherwise hidden wrist bone. Ms. Brown summarises the ‘debate.’
24 Ms. Wonderful. Great explanation. I like Mac’s explanation, his whole team. Anna explained that we are 3-D RM
B: things. Right? We’re three-dimensional beings and that this is a flat drawing, so there’s limitations to
the model. Very nice. What’s another debate?

In contrast to Ms. Green’s class, Ms. Brown does not frame this discussion in terms of a
collective problem that needs to be examined and resolved. She asks Mac, Will, and then
Calvin to come to the front of the group to talk about their ‘debate’ but does not help them
make clear to their peers what is really the fundamental issue. The boys describe that the
16 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

two views show different numbers of wrist bones, but neither they nor Ms. Brown clearly
articulate why that is a problem. Consequently, Ms. Brown does much more substantive
work summarising and clarifying the boys’ points than Ms. Green does with her students
above. We see in this example no instances of Ms. Brown using epistemic focus talk moves
because no focal issue has been identified. On the contrary, the discussion is just about
reporting out this ‘debate’ and its solution, without clearly identifying what the problem
is or collectively figuring out what makes a good solution to that problem. So, while stu-
dents are engaged in fundamentally the same issues of interpreting these bone charts as
seen in Ms. Green’s class, those interpretive issues are not framed in relation to the knowl-
edge aim of producing a consensus count. So, the students in Ms. Brown’s class lack a pur-
poseful opportunity to evaluate their methods of counting and interpretation. Instead, Ms.
Brown is largely interested that students, like the boys she calls to the front of the class,
have made sense for themselves of what they have done.

Features of a productive argument culture

The comparison of these classrooms leads us to advance prospective claims about the fea-
tures needed to promote productive argumentation in elementary science classrooms.
These features are evident in the data we have presented here but are derived from our
full experiences working with Ms. Brown and Ms. Green for three years. We discuss
these features as promoting a particular kind of culture: a context where norms and prac-
tices of argumentation develop to meet collective goals.

Collective sense-making
We consider the crucial difference between Ms. Green’s and Ms. Brown’s classrooms, and
the one that begets all others is that Ms. Green establishes science as the pursuit of collec-
tive sense-making (Enyedy, 2003). Argumentation develops as a practice in her classroom
to resolve disagreements that prevent a consensus, collective sense to be made. In this case,
the basic problem is that widely discrepant bone counts do not make sense, and for the
class to move forward they have to understand how to resolve the discrepancy. In the argu-
ment presented above, Ms. Green says relatively little, but all of her talk is oriented towards
keeping children focused on the disagreement they are trying to resolve and ascertaining
whether they agree it has been resolved. This insistence on collective sense-making was
evident from the very beginning of the school year, was appropriated by her students,
and led to increases in their individual competence in argument over the course of the
year (Ryu & Sandoval, 2012).
Ms. Green encouraged her students to try to persuade each other of their own view-
points as a means for achieving consensus. Berland and Reiser (2011) present a case com-
parison very similar to ours: one teacher whose students engage in richer arguments as
they seek to persuade each other and another whose students seem to merely interrogate
each other in order to make sense of their own explanations. Berland and Reiser argue that
the goals of persuasion and sense-making are in tension with one another and that mana-
ging that tension is complicated and hard. We do not disagree that managing productive
arguments is complicated, but Ms. Green’s example suggests sense-making and persuasion
are not inherently in tension with one another. For one thing, Ms. Green does not frame
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 17

persuasion as a goal but as a means to the goal of consensus. Individual students are not
encouraged to persuade other students that they are, individually, right. Rather, individual
students are encouraged to persuade their peers that their bid for resolving the collective
problem is appropriate. The kinds of sense that individuals might make for themselves are
framed as resources for the class’ collective sense-making.
In contrast, Ms. Brown’s students are not really arguing at all, just like one of the tea-
chers in Berland and Reiser’s (2011) study (coincidentally identified as Ms. B). Ms.
Brown’s students share their thinking, but they are not attempting to resolve contested
claims. The boys are brought up to the front of the room because they had a disagreement
among themselves, which they resolved on their own, to share their resolution. Other stu-
dents are allowed to assent to this resolution. Unlike Ms. Green, however, Ms. Brown
never frames an overarching purpose of sharing out these group resolutions. There is
no collective disagreement in play, thus nothing to try to reach consensus about. This
was a common feature of Ms. Brown’s classroom: students were often asked to share
out their thinking as a way of encouraging their individual sense-making, but competing
ideas were rarely juxtaposed or rendered problematic.

Distribution of epistemic agency

Ms. Green’s focus on collective sense-making leads directly to a broad distribution of epis-
temic agency among students, as it requires all of them to agree. In contrast, Ms. Brown
provides more limited epistemic agency to her students with her focus on individual sense-
making. As we suggested earlier, epistemic agency is manifested through the location of
authority and mechanisms of accountability (Engle & Conant, 2002).

Epistemic authority
A key distinction between these two classrooms is who has the authority to decide what
counts as knowledge in the classroom, and how such authority is exercised. Both teachers
invite students to contribute ideas to discussions, but only Ms. Green empowers her stu-
dents with the status to decide if disagreements are resolved. Ms. Brown closes the discus-
sion about the bone count once she has heard a description of the strategy she considers
viable and is confident that students, generally, have heard and understood it. Ms. Brown
positions herself as the primary epistemic authority in the classroom. She decides what
‘debates’ are worth sharing, she maintains control of the evidentiary material (the
charts), and the children largely speak to her rather than to each other.
Children in Ms. Green’s class are granted a lot of authority over the substance and man-
agement of class discussions, and therefore what comes to count as knowledge in the class-
room. The children do all of the epistemic work in the discussion, and Ms. Green limits
her role to managing the participants in the argument, orienting them towards their class-
mates, clarifying key points in the arguments, and keeping them focused on the issue they
are working to resolve. Ben raises what he considers the fundamental methodological
dilemma of navigating perspective shifts in the diagrams. Carlos suggests a resolution
to that problem by asserting the larger number of bones (in the wrist case) would be
most accurate and also suggests the mode count would be the most accurate. Diego and
Emmy raise a difficulty about that, and Diego is finally enlisted to resolve the problem
through directing a class-wide count. It is true that Ms. Green suggests this last move,
18 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

but it is in response to the challenges raised by students and the difficulty in resolving
them. The students’ assent to the move is central to resolving the discrepancy. It is
worth noting that the final count of 60 bones shows that both the original counts (turn
1 in Ms. Green’s discussion) were inaccurate.

Epistemic accountability
For classroom arguments to be productive, they must require students to be accountable
both to each other and to the discipline (Engle & Conant, 2002). Accountability thus gets
enacted in relation to whom students address themselves, and the means by which argu-
ments are judged persuasive. Social and material resources thus both become targets of
accountability.

Social accountability. Ms. Brown’s students address themselves to her, even when they are
responding to each other they do so through her. Her extensive paraphrasing and sum-
marising places her as the central voice in the discussion and orients students to her
rather than to each other. While Ms. Green starts the argument episode in her class by
suggesting the discrepant bone counts have to be resolved, she explicitly steps aside and
asks her class to construct a resolution. She repeatedly reminds students to talk to each
other (lines 12, 18, 20, and 50), and her frequent press for persuasion and consensus
holds students explicitly accountable to each other. In both classrooms, the teachers
hold the power to frame problems, but Ms. Green’s framing of problems as collective,
rather than individual, removes her as the sole, even central, locus of accountability.

Material accountability. The physical materials involved in these discussions also play
different accountability roles. Ms. Brown physically takes control of the bone chart, limit-
ing how students interact with it and with each other. Ms. Green posts the charts at the
front of the room, enabling children, when they come to the front of the room, to
touch the charts as they make their points. Moreover, there is room for multiple children
to be at the charts at the same time. So, it is very clear to observers – the other students –
what are the points of agreement and disagreement. The charts are jointly available to
multiple students at the same time. This makes clear that arguments have to be accoun-
table to the charts, and they have to help the group collectively make sense of the charts
and how to use them as measurement resources. By having more access to the charts, the
children in Ms. Green’s class have more opportunity to engage with the key evidential
resources relevant to resolving their disagreement.
Consequently, while the basic problem of perspective arises in both classes, its status as
an epistemic problem is very different in each. Ms. Brown and her students identify but do
not clearly resolve the ‘limitations to the model’ (line 25). Really, the issue as identified is
that students have to see how to use the differing perspectives, with a tacit idea that only
then can an accurate count be obtained. For Ms. Green, the multiple views on charts are
explicitly identified as a methodological problem that possibly explains the main problem
of having a discrepant count of the bones. This leads to a discussion of other methodologi-
cal problems, such as using the mode or average count, and, eventually, how to read the
number of bones in the tips of the toes. Ms. Green’s students thus have opportunities to
explore a set of measurement problems and criteria for resolving them that do not become
available to Ms. Brown’s students.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION 19

Conclusions
Our analysis of the discourse in these classrooms, and particularly of the discursive moves
made by Ms. Green, leads us to conclude that generating productive argumentation in
elementary science classrooms depends upon organising a culture of argumentation in
the classroom marked by a shared goal of consensus, achieved through collective norms
for persuasion and practices aligned with those norms. We attribute the difficulties seen
in most argumentation interventions, and their limited successes, as deriving from a mis-
placed focus on argument as a separate skill that can be targeted by specific sorts of lessons.
In Ms. Green’s classroom, arguments arose because children naturally disagreed with each
other about how to best explain the things they were studying. These disagreements were
both conceptual and methodological. Ms. Green’s success in getting her students to work
through these disagreements lay in her ability to get her students to appropriate the goal of
consensus and exploiting her position as the teacher to press children to articulate not just
their ideas about the topics but their ideas about what it would take to convince them of
something.
Our interpretations build on work showing the effects that consensus goals have on stu-
dents’ argumentation (Garcia-Mila et al., 2013; Larrain et al., 2018; Mercer, 2009). The
specific talk moves we identified as important in these classrooms are increasingly recog-
nised, if not always labelled the same, as important for promoting arguments (Gomez Zac-
carelli, Schindler, Borko, & Osborne, 2018; McNeill & Pimentel, 2010; Michaels et al.,
2008). In particular, the moves we identified seem crucial for helping Ms. Green to estab-
lish ‘ground rules’ (Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, & Sams, 2004) for how students can reach
consensus when they disagree.
The contrast between Ms. Brown and Ms. Green is not one of skill but of goal. Both of
these teachers were recognised at their school as outstanding teachers, and we saw their
skill in numerous ways in both classrooms. The arguments in Ms. Green’s science
lessons were more epistemically productive because Ms. Green had a more amenable
aim for argumentation. Ms. Green’s aim of collective sense-making provided opportu-
nities for students to exercise genuine epistemic agency in ways that a focus on individual
sense-making does not. We concur with recent suggestions that specific talk moves or
instructional strategies have to be understood in relation to the aims for which they are
developed (Ghousseini et al., 2015; McNeill et al., 2017).
These features of a productive argument culture are available to any science teacher,
of course. They involve a relatively small set of commitments to enact. Most obviously,
this culture begins by framing science activity and thus science learning in school, as
inherently collective. This shift leads directly to social accountability, as students must
generate and refine criteria and standards for their own work, with the teacher’s
crucial role being to maintain student focus on the key epistemic issues to resolve,
as Ms. Green does here. Of course, disagreements cannot be resolved unless they
arise, so students must be engaged with material resources that can both generate
and be used to resolve disagreements. Finally, teachers must trust that their students
can engage productively when the purposes of their effort are clearly framed and
they are supported in maintaining a focus towards consensus resolution. Such trust
involves literally giving students space and time to argue competing positions until
they reach consensus.
20 W. A. SANDOVAL ET AL.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DRL award #0733233)
and from the Spencer Foundation. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the
authors only, and do not represent the official views and opinions of the sponsors. We thank the
teachers and students of the UCLA Lab School who participated in this work.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 0733233] and the
Spencer Foundation [grant number 201300056].

ORCID
William A. Sandoval http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1667-6163
Sihan Xiao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0067-4414

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