To address the need for reform in undergraduate science education a new instructional
model called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) was developed and then implemented in a
undergraduate chemistry course at a community college in the southeastern United States
(Sampson, Walker, & Grooms, 2009; Walker, Sampson, & Zimmerman, in press). The ADI
instructional model is designed to give a more central place to argumentation and the role of
argument in the social construction of scientific knowledge. This research investigated the
growth in the quality of the student generated arguments and the scientific argumentation that
took place over the course of a semester.