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   Jingyan Wang, Ivan Stelmakh ( January 2021 , AAAI)
2. Debiasing Evaluations That Are Biased by Evaluations

   Wang, Jingyan ; Stelmakh, Ivan ; Wei, Yuting ; Shah, Nihar ( May 2021 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
3. Coherence shifts in attribute evaluations.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000151  

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4. Students’ Scientific Evaluations of Water Resources

   https://doi.org/10.3390/w12072048  

   Medrano, Josh ; Jaffe, Joshua ; Lombardi, Doug ; Holzer, Margaret A. ; Roemmele, Christopher ( July 2020 , Water)

   Socially-relevant and controversial topics, such as water issues, are subject to differences in the explanations that scientists and the public (herein, students) find plausible. Students need to be more evaluative of the validity of explanations (e.g., explanatory models) based on evidence when addressing such topics. We compared two activities where students weighed connections between lines of evidence and explanations. In one activity, students were given four evidence statements and two models (one scientific and one non-scientific alternative); in the other, students chose four out of eight evidence statements and three models (two scientific and one non-scientific). Repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that both activities engaged students’ evaluations and differentially shifted students’ plausibility judgments and knowledge. A structural equation model suggested that students’ evaluation may influence post-instructional plausibility and knowledge; when students chose their lines of evidence and explanatory models, their evaluations were deeper, with stronger shifts toward a scientific stance and greater levels of post-instructional knowledge. The activities may help to develop students’ critical evaluation skills, a scientific practice that is key to understanding both scientific content and science as a process. Although effect sizes were modest, the results provided critical information for the final development and testing stage of these water resource instructional activities. 

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5. Students’ Scientific Evaluations of Astronomical Origins

   https://doi.org/10.32374/AEJ.2022.2.1.032ra  

   Dobaria, Archana ; Bailey, Janelle M. ; Klavon, Timothy G. ; Lombardi, Doug ( September 2022 , Astronomy Education Journal)

   Students often encounter alternative explanations about astronomical phenomena. However, inconsistent with astronomers’ practices, students may not be scientific, critical, and evaluative when comparing alternatives. Instructional scaffolds, such as the Model-Evidence Link (MEL) diagram, where students weigh connections between lines of evidence and alternative explanations, may help facilitate students’ scientific evaluation and deepen their learning about astronomy. Our research team has developed two forms of the MEL: (a) the preconstructed MEL (pcMEL), where students are given four lines of evidence and two alternative explanatory models about the formation of Earth’s Moon and (b) the build-a-MEL (baMEL), where students construct their own diagrams by choosing four lines scientific evidence out of eight choices and two alternative explanatory model out of three choices, about the origins of the Universe. The present study compared the more autonomy-supportive baMEL to the less autonomy-supportive pcMEL and found that both scaffolds shifted high school student and preservice teacher participants’ plausibility judgments toward a more scientific stance and increased their knowledge about the topics. Additional analyses revealed that the baMEL resulted in deeper evaluations and had stronger relations between levels of evaluation and post-instructional plausibility judgements and knowledge compared to the pcMEL. This present study, focused on astronomical topics, supports our team’s earlier research that scaffolds such as the MELs in combination with more autonomy-supportive classrooms may be one way to deepen students’ scientific thinking and increase their knowledge of complex scientific phenomena.

    

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