Developing Students’ Scientific Writing and Presentation Skills through Argument Driven Inquiry: An Exploratory Study

In this study, we employed a new instructional model that helps students develop scientific writing and presentation skills. Argument-driven inquiry (ADI) is one of the most novel instructional models that emphasizes the role of argumentation and inquiry in science education equally. This is an exploratory study where five ADI lab activities take place with a group of students guided by their classroom teacher. The main aim of this study was to investigate the effect of laboratory instruction that was designed based on ADI on students’ ability to write and present scientifically. For this purpose, three sets of instruments were used: argumentative writing assessment, poster evaluation checklist, and student assessment of their learning gains (SALG) survey. The results showed that students developed their writing skills in all three aspects: argument structure, argument content, and writing mechanism. However, the highest score in terms of these improvements was obtained in the quality of students’ argument content. Also, the current study findings explicitly showed that ADI activities could help students improve their scientific presentation skills. At the end of the ADI activities, each group got higher than 50 points out of 65 points, while their scores were nearly 30 points at the beginning of activities.