The middle school students' reasonings about multiple responses for the same scientific question

In science classes, the connection of science with fields such as philosophy, history, psychology and sociology is categorized under the title of Nature of Science. With the addition of socio-scientific issues to the 2013 Science Education Program, it has been started to investigate which criteria the students take as a basis when deciding on such issues and how they use their beliefs about the nature of science within these contexts. In this study,within the scope of the FESKÖK project, which aims to reveal the effects of science education focused on socioscientific issues, the students were presented the scenarios that try to make them decide around a socio-scientific issue and that contain different views. Besides, regarding these scenarios, the question, "Do you think there is not a single response in science?" was asked to the students. The data of 5th and 8th grade students trained within the scope of the project were examined as pre-test and post-test, and the responses given to aforementioned open-ended question were subjected to a comparative thematic analysis. The participants of the study consisted of 15 students in 5th grades and 24 students in 8th grades. This study demonstrated that school students used either fantasy-based or data-based reasoning about multiple responses for same scientific question. The responses of the students are divided into following developmental groups considering the pre and post test responses in terms of the impact of the project: 1) those who do not change their fantasy-based reasoning, 2) those who develop from fantasy-based reasoning to data-based reasoning, and 3) those who do not change their data-based reasoning. In phantasy-based reasoning, they easily reach a single conclusion thanks to value-oriented beliefs, fusing the scientific explanations up in the scenario, and languageoriented logical mechanisms. In data-based reasoning, six different mechanisms emerged: 1) the best argument epistemology, 2) falsification, 3) conditional relativity, 4) multivariate epistemology, 5) multi-method epistemology, and 6) multi-approach epistemology. Study results have shown that school students' reasoning about multiple responses for the same scientific question is more complex than the current classification of reasonings in the literature. In this context, science educators can benefit from this classification as a rubric. Keywords: Epistemological beliefs, multiple responses for same scientific question, nature of science, socioscientific issues.