Challenges of the 21 century increase the need for complex skills and require that students are able to use knowledge for understanding, describing and solving societal phenomena. Scientific reasoning and argumentation (SRA) are recognized to be such an important 21st century skill (e.g. Trilling & Fadel, 2009) and its acquisition is among the intended goals of academic programs in secondary education around the world (National Research Council, 2012; OECD, 2006). SRA can be defined as the ability to understand and being able to use scientific concepts, methods, and findings appropriately when solving or explaining problems in a specific discipline (Fischer et al., 2014; Hetmanek et al., 2018). Attention for SRA in education aims at an advanced knowledge acquisition hereby transcending a focus on introductory learning, that often is characterized by mere reproduction and application of knowledge (Feltovich et al., 1993; Glaser, 1984; Von Glasersfeld, 2001). SRA put high demands on complex conceptual understanding, in particular for nonparadigmatic disciplines like psychology and sociology (Sanbonmatsu & Johnston, 2019). The complexity of the subject matter of these disciplines can be described according to the following dimensions (Feltovich et al., 1993): (1) abstractness of concepts, (2) continuity and dynamic nature of psychological and sociological processes, (4) simultaneity in which these processes occur, (5) actions are not mechanical effects of actions, (6) interactivity of processes, (7) conditionality or context-dependency of principles and (8) nonlinearity of relations among processes or entities.

While SRA is considered a valued outcome of general secondary education both in society as in literature, previous research falls short in two areas. First, how SRA can be effectively taught remains a question that cannot yet be adequately answered (Fischer et al., 2014). And secondly, studies on SRA have mainly been limited to the context of hard sciences (Engelmann et al., 2018). Therefore the overall aim of the project is to investigate how SRA can be effectively taught in the soft sciences of psychology and social sciences, hereafter called behavioral sciences. As a first step in this project, relevant context and student variables were explored in the current study, as well as ways teachers would respond to them. The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) was used and refers to “the knowledge that teachers develop over time, and through experience about how to teach a particular content in particular ways in order to lead to enhanced student understanding” (Loughran et al., 2006, p. 9). The study aims to capture teachers’ PCK on SRA in behavioral sciences to answer the following research question: Based on teachers’ knowledge and experience, what are main challenges in teaching SRA in behavioral sciences and how can they be dealt with?

A qualitative research design is used to explore and interpret the main issues about teaching SRA as raised by behavioral sciences teachers. The study adopts a social constructivist interpretative framework (Creswell & Poth, 2018) and was guided by grounded theory principles (Charmaz, 2015). Data were collected in focus groups to provide multiple perspectives on the topic. Three focus groups were conducted of which two online synchronous and one face-to-face. Each focus group took about two hours and all were led by the same moderator. After the third focus group saturation was reached. A total of 15 teachers participated in the study. Each focus group consisted of five teachers. Participants were recruited through the researchers’ networks. Each focus group was homogeneous regarding school subject (behavioral science) and educational level (upper secondary education). Heterogeneity was based on gender, years of teaching experience and educational provider. Eleven women and four men participated in the study and teaching experience ranged from two years up to 27 years. Six teachers came from publicly funded schools, nine teachers from private funded schools [Footnote: In Flanders 28% of all secondary schools are publicly funded, 72 % are privately funded]. Semi-structured interviews were structured in four phases: introduction, core questions, end questions and a closure. Core questions served to elicit teachers’ PCK and were clustered in four groups according to their epistemic activity. Each cluster was introduced by an exemplary SRA-task. To analyze and explore the main themes about teaching SRA a reflexive thematic analysis was used (Braun & Clark, 2012). A theme was described in this study as “a shared meaning organized around a central concept” (Braun & Clarke, 2022, p. 76). In a first phase all focus groups were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Next, transcripts were organized into provisional semantic codes. To keep part of the context, broader fragments like a sentence or a short paragraph (maximum 10-15 lines) were identified. In a third step, codes were checked and reviewed within and across focus groups. Fourth, codes of the entire dataset were combined into meaning-based descriptive statements or themes and reviewed, resulting in final themes. In a final step themes were subject to more extensive interpretations and conceptual analysis of the latent ideas underpinning them.

The study identifies six descriptive themes that capture teachers’ most discussed and reported issues on teaching SRA in behavioral sciences: (1) SRA development needs time and continuous practice to develop, (2) SRA development needs modeling and being explicit about the steps to be taken, (3) the development of SRA requires deep and highly connected domain-specific knowledge, (4) the development of SRA requires a meta-level awareness, (5) SRA development requires students to be actively engaged with the subject-matter, and (6) Evaluating SRA is a challenge. Three latent ideas seem to underpin the descriptive themes. A first idea refers to teachers’ educational ambitions of behavioral sciences education. The data suggest that a focus on introductory learning rather than on advanced knowledge acquisition (Feltovich et al., 1993) resulted in lower perceived relevance and feasibility of SRA development. Second, teachers’ epistemological beliefs seem to have resulted in the reported difficulties of evaluating SRA. It appears that a subjectivist stance towards behavioral sciences and a tolerance of multiple viewpoints might have resulted in a concern on the sheer impossibility to assess competing claims (Hofer, 2001). Third, for teachers to be able to teach SRA, profound domain specific knowledge appears to be essential (Sinatra & Chinn, 2012). This may be especially the case for a nonparadigmatic field as behavioral sciences. The study suggests that higher knowledge expectations in behavioral sciences education also requires teachers to hold deep and highly structured content knowledge (Gess-Newsome & Lederman, 1999).

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