Investigating middle school students' informal reasoning patterns

Students should be able to use skills such as problem solving, examining from different perspectives, thinking scientifically, and making decisions about science-related issues that influence their lives. These are the skills that scientifically literate individuals have. In order to develop these skills, individiuals should be engaged with informal reasoning process which is used to negotiate socioscientific issues due to its dilemma, open-ended and complex nature. With this in mind, the aim of this study is to examine the informal reasoning patterns of 7th grade students in the context of winter tires. For this purpose, case study was performed with the data collection tool developed by the researcher. During the data collection process, interviews were conducted with the students over scenarios containing different perspectives on winter tire use, which is a problem they may encounter in daily life. The qualitative data analysis revealed that students can show different informal reasoning patterns against different views in the context of the winter tire. At the same time, it was found that the students were able to make moral reasoning on moral issues. It has been observed that when students encounter an emotional situation, they approach with empathy and sympathy and show emotional informal reasoning. The situation in which students had the most difficulty in making decision was the emotional content. In order to make sound and informed decisions, individuals need to be able to use a variety of informal reasoning patterns besides emotional reasoning. In this direction, it is suggested that the data collection tool developed in this research can be used to explore students' informal reasoning patterns. As a result of this, teaching activities including socioscientific issues and informal reasoning patterns can be designed and implemented accordingly. Keywords: Informal reasoning, Socioscientific issues, Informal reasoning patterns, Scientific literacy, Science education