Listen to each other: how the building of norms in an elementary science classroom fosters participation and argumentation

The present study explores and documents the process of building social and argumentation norms in a combined third- and fourth-grade science classroom and examines how the processes regulate students' participation patterns, including the students' roles. This study also investigates the positive potential of negotiating norms and taking on intellectual participatory roles for fostering scientific argumentation. The analysis focuses on how one norm, listening to each other, contributes to distributing participation rates and forces students to take more critical audience and intellectual roles. Students also show improvement in argumentation in terms of frequency and epistemic quality.