This work presents an assessment of pre-service teachers’
argumentative practice, after implementing a novel teachinglearning
sequence on soil health including a citizen science
programme, which was applied outdoors at the university
garden. The sequence was implemented at five Spanish
universities with 351 undergraduates studying Early Childhood
and Primary Teacher Education. It posed a final assessment task
consisting in a real-world situation that involved making
decisions on science-related issues: students needed to argue
whether it was possible to use a piece of land as a school garden,
based on soil data provided in a variety of formats. To assess
participants’ level of achievement, a rubric was specifically
designed by adapting the Evidence-Explanation Continuum
approach, which was applied to a subsample of 123 answers
(35%). Results evidenced that the process of knowledge-building
discourse from initial data to final explanations involved a series
of transformations of increasing difficulty, since the percentage of
students who were able to correctly accomplish them decreased
a long the continuum. Including the citizen science programme
promoted the development of basic aspects of scientific literacy
related to interpreting data and evidence scientifically but, for
students to be generally capable of drawing evidence-based
conclusions, argumentation practices should be regularly
included in science classes.
