Investigation of the relationship between middle school students' epistemological beliefs, logical thinking abilities, science achievements and their arguments towards socioscientific issues

The aim of this study was to examine middle school students' argumentation skills through three different socioscientific issues (i.e., artificial intelligence technologies, animal experiments, and the COVID-19 vaccine), and to investigate the extent to which students' epistemological beliefs, logical thinking abilities, science achievement and gender predict their argumentation skills. The research adopted a quantitative research method and used a correlational research design. The participants were selected through convenient sampling and consisted of a total of 102 seventh grade students (57 girls and 45 boys) from a public middle school in the Alanya district of Antalya province in 2022-2023 academic year. Students' epistemological beliefs were obtained through Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire which was adapted to Turkish by Özkan (2008), while their logical thinking abilities were determined using the Logical Thinking Ability Test, adapted to Turkish by Geban, Aşkar, and Özkan (1992). Additionally, students' science achievements were determined based on their end-of-term science course grades, and their argumentation skills were assessed based on their responses to open-ended questions in three socioscientific scenarios. Data were analyzed by using the SPSS statistical analysis package program. Descriptive findings indicated that 7th grade students had advanced epistemological beliefs but low logical thinking abilities. They displayed differing stances in response to different scenarios, and their argumentation skills distributed across low levels. Multiple regression analysis results, on the other hand, showed that epistemological beliefs, logical thinking abilities, science achievement, and gender variables explained approximately 36% of the variance in students' argumentation quality.