Scientific reasoning abilities of upper secondary school students in private schools

Abstract

Scientific reasoning is one of the basic important abilities in science education. Some evidence in research about students’ scientific reasoning could be utilized with expected outcomes to promote and develop our students to become scientific literacy person. The purpose of this research is to investigate each component of students’ scientific reasoning ability. The participants for this research were grade 10 students of a private school in Bangkok who were studying in the second semester of the academic year 2019. The number of participants was 31 students. The research instrument was a scientific reasoning test with the reliability of 0.89. Descriptive statistics was selected to analyze the data. The results found that 27.34 was the mean percentage score of scientific reasoning ability. The component aspect for specifying the subjects from observation has the highest percentage score of 63.98, and the lowest percentage score of 8.60 was detected for the probability reasoning component aspect. When classifying students according to their levels of complexity in reasoning, it was shown that 24 students had a scientific reasoning ability at least complex level, 7 of them had the ability somewhat complex level, and none of them was at more complex level. The results showed that the participants have some basic ability to identify specifying the subjects from observation which is the basic component aspect of scientific reasoning. However, there is a need for improving this to higher abilities, and it is necessary to further develop other components in scientific reasoning ability as well.