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Socially relevant geoscience topics may be difficult for students to learn. For example, connecting hydraulic fracturing to Midwestern US earthquake swarms and using the fossil record to infer past Earth environments may challenge students because of their prior exposures to nonscientific explanations. Sociocognitive theoretical perspectives based on decades of developmental and educational psychology, as well as science education research posit that students may have particular difficulty in evaluating the connections between lines of scientific evidence and explanations. This challenge is especially daunting when students are confronted with various alternative explanations (e.g., scientific and nonscientific explanations). In the present study, we compared two types of scaffolds designed to facilitate Mid-Atlantic middle school students’ (N = 40) scientific thinking and learning about controversial geoscience topics when confronted with alternative explanations. In a less autonomy-supportive scaffold, participants were given four lines of evidence and two explanatory models, one scientific and one nonscientific. (Fracking; Supplementary Materials 1 & 2); in a more autonomy-supportive scaffold, students chose four of eight lines of evidence and two of three explanatory models, one scientific and two nonscientific (Fossils; Supplementary Materials 1 & 2). Quantitative analyses revealed that both activities facilitated students’ evaluations in shifting students’ judgments toward the scientific and deepening their knowledge, although the more autonomy-supportive activity had greater effect sizes. Structural equation modeling suggested that more scientific judgments related to greater knowledge at post-instruction for the more autonomy-supportive scaffold. These activities may help students develop more scientific evaluation skills, which are central to understanding geoscience content and science as a process. 

Science learning is an important part of the K-12 educational experience, as well as in the lives of students. This study considered students’ science learning as they engaged in the instruction of scientific issues with social relevance. With classroom environments radically changing during the COVID-19 pandemic, our study adapted to teachers and students as they were forced to change from more traditional, in-person instructional settings to virtual, online instruction settings. In the present study, we considered science learning during a scaffold-facilitated process, where secondary students evaluated the connections between lines of scientific evidence and alternative explanations about fossil fuels and climate change and gauged the plausibility of each explanation. Our investigation focused on the relations between students’ levels of evaluations, shifts in plausibility judgments, and knowledge gains, and examined whether there were differences in these relations between in-person classroom settings and virtual classroom settings. The results revealed that the indirect relational pathway linking higher levels of evaluation, plausibility shifts toward a more scientific stance, and greater knowledge gains was meaningful and more robust than the direct relational pathway linking higher levels of evaluation to greater knowledge gains. The results also showed no meaningful difference between the two instructional settings, suggesting the potential adaptiveness and effectiveness of properly-designed, scaffolded science instruction. 

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.