Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21343006s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #430.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.263
Mathematics
Logic
Scientific paper
Pluto's perilous peregrination from planet to dwarf planet to plutoid has generated an amount of public interest unparalleled since the first space mission to Jupiter. This paper reports on the results of an activity where students at a variety of grade levels were asked to assess the Pluto controversy and recommend the appropriate place of Pluto in a scale model solar system. This activity addresses aspects of the scientific process that are often difficult to treat using other learning sequences, namely:
• The tentative nature of scientific knowledge
• Constructing a scientific argument that supports a particular point of view, and including evidence in that argument
• The way that scientific communities attempt to develop consensus about controversial issues.
Data from these activities reveals that 8th grade students, college students, and adults are all still interested in Pluto and will engage with the challenge of producing a credible argument. Preliminary analyses of the papers submitted by college students doing this exercise reveals that 54% of their arguments were classified as "high quality” arguments, using scales drawn from the argumentation literature. High quality arguments use several different logical sequences, not only one, and have some degree of logical complexity. 46 % of these arguments used several pieces of evidence to back up their viewpoint. A separate paper (Shipman and Bergeron 2007) reveals that, apart from the tremendous publicity, the Pluto controversy was rather similar to other controversies in astronomy and chemistry. Thus the conclusions which students draw from Pluto have a decent chance of being applicable to science in general.
This research has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation's Distinguished Teaching Scholars program.
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