Narrowing the gaps of scientific argumentation skills between the high and low academic achievers

Abstract

The 21^st century education has become the primary focus of the development of higher order thinking skills, such as scientific argumentation skills. The facts show that high school students from Malang, Indonesia have poor scientific argumentation performance. The implementation of innovative learning models is key to improving students’ scientific argumentation skills. This study aimed to investigate the effects of RICOSRE, Problem Based Learning (PBL) and conventional learning models on students’ scientific argumentation skills. This study involved 93 students from Public Senior High School Number 8 (SMAN 8) Malang and 90 students from Public Senior High School Number 1 (SMAN 1) Turen Indonesia. SMAN 8 Malang was selected as a representative sample of high academic achievers while SMAN 1 Turen was appointed as a representative sample of low academic achievers. This quasi experimental study employed a pre- test-post-test non equivalent control group design. Both the pretest and the post-test contained eight essay questions. ANACOVA and LSD tests were run to analyze the participants’ tests’ scores. Compared to learners in the PBL and conventional groups, learners in the RICOSRE group scored significantly higher in scientific argumentation. However, there was no significant difference between the higher academic achievers and the lower academic achievers in terms of scientific argumentation scores. Unlike PBL and conventional models, RICOSRE was proven to be the most effective learning model that can be used to narrow the gaps of scientific argumentation skills between learners from the higher academic achievement group and learners from the lower academic achievement group.