School Scientific Argumentation at and its Contribution to the Learning of a Complex Model of Health and Disease

Abstract

This paper approaches the existing relationship between the learning of “school scientific argumentation” and the acquisition of a complex model of health and disease,
more specifically to explain the emergence and re-emergence of diseases. It is assumed
that school scientific argumentation is a linguistic-cognitive procedure which leads to the
production of a text that explains a topic in which four key domains can be recognized:
pragmatics, rhetoric, theory and logics. A historic-epistemological analysis of health as a
concept was performed and the stance adopted was in favor of a complex model defined as
multi-causal and multi-referential. A didactic unit was designed to teach both concepts with
emphasis on the metacognitive and self-regulatory processes set into motion through the
basis of orientation and instances of self-evaluation, co-evaluation and hetero-evaluation.
The study is aligned in a model of illocutionary explanation.