Which side are you on? The role of attitudes in reasoning practices in student-group interactions regarding a socio-scientific issue related to climate change

ABSTRACT While researchers have stressed the importance of engaging students in activities that enhance their reasoning practices, few have scrutinised the factors that impact the reasoning involved in such activities. We explored the role of attitudes in student-group interactions concerning a climate change-related socio-scientific issue and how those attitudes emerged from the reasoning process. We applied Martin and White’s [(2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan] appraisal framework for studying attitudes in oral language to analyse two student groups involved in a discourse as they constructed arguments supporting further petroleum exploration. The two groups displayed unique patterns of attitudes towards additional exploration: one group displayed strong, positive attitudes, while the other displayed varied attitudes, including doubt and insecurity. These more complex attitudes in the second group were important to how these students reasoned about the issue, enabling them to appreciate the complexity of the issue, as the expression of multiple perspectives and doubt opened a richer inquiry into the socio-scientific issue, enhancing the quality of their reasoning. Our findings point to the significance of considering students’ attitudes when organising activities were students’ reason about a socio-scientific issue.


Introduction
Many view climate change, along with loss of biodiversity and pollution, as the defining global issues of our time (United Nations Environment Programme, 2022).According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO (2020), education must shift to providing students with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes required to cope with and act against climate change.
Science education can empower students to act against climate change (Schreiner et al., 2005) by providing them with relevant knowledge and preparing them to negotiate complexity, contemplate moral and ethical dimensions and make decisions (Berkowitz & Simmons, 2003;Kolstø, 2001;Zeidler & Sadler, 2008).In the field of science education, climate change is commonly categorised as a socio-scientific issue (SSI).SSIs are current, controversial issues that lack a clear right or wrong solution, such as those related to genetic engineering, the environment and energy consumption (Kolstø, 2006;Peel et al., 2017;Sadler & Zeidler, 2004).Citizens in a democratic society are frequently required to negotiate and make decisions about SSIs as voters and consumers and in conversations with fellow citizens.Therefore, science education regarding SSIs should promote students' ability to address these matters by engaging learners in negotiation processes that consider the societal dimension and the complexity of moral and ethical factors (Driver et al., 2000;Zeidler et al., 2005).Thus, studies that examine students' reasoning are needed to better understand how such broader concerns and values play out in learning processes.
Several studies have provided valuable insights into how SSI teaching can develop students' capacities for sophisticated reasoning, demonstrating that students' reasoning is impacted by factors beyond conceptual knowledge about the issue, such as identity, values, moral considerations, personal beliefs, attitudes towards the SSI, emotions and social environment (Chang et al., 2018;Sadler & Zeidler, 2004, 2005;Simonneaux & Simonneaux, 2009a;Wu & Tsai, 2011).Data for most studies on students' reasoning processes have been gathered through interviews or large-scale questionnaires.A commonly used activity when assessing SSI teaching is to engage students in group discussions about the SSI.Few studies, however, have examined how reasoning emerges through smallgroup discussions in natural classroom settings.
The results of this study will contribute to research on SSI-related reasoning practices by gaining insights into the role of attitudes displayed in student-group interactions.The underlying assumption is that attitudes that emerge in student-group interactions are potentially important drivers of learning by guiding students' attention and aesthetical and ethical judgments and by impacting the patterns of interactions.
The empirical setting was a Norwegian upper secondary school, where a science project concerning an SSI-related issue (climate change) was in progress.The project required student groups to construct arguments in favour of or against further petroleum exploration in the Barents Sea.Two research questions guided our empirical analysis: RQ1: How do attitudes emerge in student-group interactions concerning an SSI related to climate change?RQ2: How do displayed attitudes affect reasoning during student-group interactions related to SSIs?
The study is a novel exploration of attitudes in the oral language in a classroom setting using Martin and White's (2005) appraisal framework to examine transcribed video recordings of student-group interactions.Acknowledging the limitations of our exploratory study to a single setting, our objective is to not only delve into this specific context but also to stimulate further investigations.These potential future inquiries could extend the application of Martin and White's appraisal framework (2005) to a broader context and integrate it into other research methodologies.

Socio-scientific reasoning and factors impacting student reasoning
The reasoning applied in students' negotiations about SSIs is informal.Informal reasoning relies on attitudes and opinions to evaluate positions, to consider causes, consequences, risks, benefits and costs and to identify pros and cons of multiple perspectives or decision alternatives (Sadler, 2004;Zohar & Nemet, 2002).Sophisticated informal reasoning is essential for students' responsible, informed and sustainable decisions; therefore, students' reasoning about SSIs has received significant scholarly attention (Chang et al., 2018;Dawson & Venville, 2009;Kinslow et al., 2019;Romine et al., 2020;Sadler & Zeidler, 2005;Simonneaux & Simonneaux, 2009b;Wu & Tsai, 2007).
To capture reasoning practices associated with SSIs, Sadler and colleagues (2007) suggested 'socio-scientific reasoning' (SSR) as a framework.SSR involves several related aspects required for making informed and responsible decisions regarding SSIs; Sadler et al. (2007) suggested four: (1) recognising complexity, (2) taking multiple perspectives, (3) the need for ongoing inquiry and (4) reflective scepticism.
One group of quasi-experimental studies that used the SSR framework to determine whether students' reasoning skills were enhanced by participating in SSI teaching demonstrated various results (Kinslow et al., 2019;Romine et al., 2017;Romine et al., 2020;Sadler et al., 2011).Romine et al. (2017) examined undergraduate students' SSR after one week of SSI teaching and found no significant gains in SSR abilities, while a follow-up study showed that university students' SSR increased during a 15-week SSIteaching course (Romine et al., 2020).While these studies indicate the length of SSI teaching is associated with its impact on students' SSR, they provide no further insight into how students' reasoning emerges through such teaching.
The studies cited shed light on SSR as a conceptual hierarchy, as recognising complexity has proven to be the SSR-related aspect easiest for students to engage in.However, students struggle to move forward to considering multiple perspectives, while scepticism and inquiry are 'higher order' activities that require students first to consider multiple perspectives (Kinslow et al., 2019;Romine et al., 2017;Romine et al., 2020;Sadler et al., 2007).This highlights the key role that considering multiple perspectives plays in SSR, as students need to ponder multiple perspectives to reach sophisticated reasoning.The significance of contemplating multiple perspectives was also stressed by Kahn and Zeidler (2019), who argued that perspective-taking supports students' development of empathy, moral sensitivity and related constructs.
Along with studies assessing students' reasoning skills after their participation in SSI teaching, a group of qualitative studies have investigated students' reasoning about SSIs and factors impacting that reasoning.
In a study examining university students' SSR regarding a local and a global SSI, Simonneaux and Simonneaux (2009b) found students' reasoning was influenced by their emotional proximity to the issue: when proximity to the issue increased, the quality of the SSR decreased.Students took an emotional position on the local issue but used more aspects of SSR and considered more perspectives for the global issue.These findings indicate that, if the SSI challenges students' values, the affective reaction can obstruct SSR.
Attitudes and positions underlie informal reasoning and, therefore, also students' reasoning about SSIs (Zohar & Nemet, 2002).Nevertheless, the influence displayed attitudes have on students' reasoning practices related to SSIs has not been investigated.
However, studies on attitudes displayed in student-group interactions have been conducted in social-psychology research.One such study demonstrated that engaging students in a group discussion creates the potential for several arguments and attitudes to be displayed, which can trigger attitude changes, especially if the arguments are in the same direction and other perspectives are not considered (Echabe & Castro, 1999).Research has further revealed that group norms, argument framing and speaker credibility impact the effect on group members' attitudes (Albarracin & Shavitt, 2018;Keizer & Schultz, 2019;Petty et al., 1997).The credibility of the argument can also affect potential attitude changes.Moreover, group members often use peer responses to gauge which statements or arguments are suitable based on group norms (Keizer & Schultz, 2019).Hence, group norms indirectly impact the number and direction of arguments and statements produced; research has also shown that social norms are integral in shaping young people's attitudes (Corner et al., 2015).
To summarise, prior studies have highlighted factors that impact students' SSI-related reasoning, including SSR.However, most studies relied on students' self-reported data, such as interview transcripts and questionnaire responses: few studies have explicitly investigated what influences students' reasoning practices when they are engaged in SSI-related group discussions.Therefore, how these factors emerge from and impact student-group interactions about SSI remains unknown, although this knowledge is crucial because group discussions are common in SSI teaching.

A framework for studying attitudes in oral language
To operationalise attitudes, we used Martin and White's (2005) appraisal framework for studying attitudes in written and oral language.The framework, which addresses language resources used when expressing, negotiating or naturalising interpersonal and ideological positions, has origins in systemic functional linguistics (SFL; Halliday & Hasan, 1989).The attitude system comprises three categories: affect, judgment, and appreciation (Martin & White, 2005).Affect deals with spontaneous expressions of emotions.How someone reacts emotionally to another's behaviour or to a certain phenomenon can be further categorised as positive or negative and based on type of feeling.Judgment relates to the ethical evaluation of other people and their behaviours.Judgment further branches into two categories: social esteem and social sanction.Judgments related to social esteem are concerned with whether the speaker admires or criticises people or their behaviour (Martin & White, 2005), while social sanction is often built on established rules and addresses whether the speaker praises or condemns people or their behaviours positively or negatively.Appreciation encompasses the ethical evaluation of objects, entities and phenomena and can be further classified into how the target is being evaluated and whether the appreciation is positive or negative.
As noted, analysis of these patterns is fundamentally about analysing the meaning of an unfolding discourse by examining its text.Some aspects of meaning cannot be interpreted within the context of a particular clause alone but must also be inferred across clauses.Thus, our interpretations sometimes extend beyond the wording and grammatical pattern in the encoded clause.

Petroleum exploration in the Barents Sea -A socio-scientific issue
We chose petroleum exploration in the Barents Sea for the discussion examined in this research because it was a controversial issue with a scientific dimension covered by the local Norwegian and international newspapers (Sengupta, 2017).The issue arose when non-government organisations (NGOs) sued Norway's government because of its plan to further explore for petroleum in the Barents Sea.The NGOs considered the plan a violation of Norway's constitution, which grants citizens the right to a healthy environment.
Norway's plan for further petroleum exploration in the Barents Sea is a socio-scientific issue.First, the issue has a clear environmental dimension: the science community concurs that global carbon dioxide emissions must be significantly reduced to mitigate climate change.United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutters requested immediate action by all countries to 'end all new fossil fuel exploration and production, and shift fuel subsidies into renewable energy' (United Nations, 2021).Second, the issue also encompasses societal and economic dimensions.Norwegian petroleum development significantly contributed to the establishment of Norway's internationally acclaimed welfare system.The position citizens take on the issue depends on the perspectives they decide are most important, which calls for convergence between economic development, social equity and environmental protection concerns.

Educational setting and participants
Data were collected from one science class of 30 upper secondary, 15-16-year-old students during three classroom lessons at a school in the outskirts of Oslo, Norway, over two weeks in May 2018.The project aim was to provide students with insights into the ongoing SSI in focus and prepare them to discuss the quality of arguments used, identify the inherent complexity of the issue and gain insights into multiple perspectives.Project activities centred on a range of textual and visual representations, such as chronicles, diagrams, models, pictures and graphs.Initially, data were collected as part of a larger research project, REDE during which researchers (including the authors) and three science teachers collaborated to develop instructional units (Knain et al., 2017).
The empirical basis for this study was two 45-minute and one 90-minute classroom lessons, during which students worked in groups to construct arguments either in favour of or against further petroleum exploration in the Barents Sea, which they presented in a mock court session.Table 1 outlines the activities from each session.
During the first lesson, the teacher introduced the group task, divided students into 10 groups of 3 and assigned each group an organisation to represent: four groups represented the government, four represented NGOs and two groups acted as lawyers (one representing the government and the other representing the NGOs in the court session).The government groups' task was to construct arguments supporting further petroleum exploration, while the NGO groups constructed arguments against petroleum exploration.The lawyer groups formulated critical questions to pose to the opposition.All received 15 climate change representations (Figure 1) to use in constructing their arguments.For the second lesson, two groups representing the same side merged into one, creating two government groups and two NGO groups, each with six students.The two lawyer groups did not merge.The merged groups shared their arguments and together constructed the 'best' arguments to present in court.The dividing and merging of groups were performed by the teacher without any involvement from the researchers.The third lesson was the court session.The classroom was transformed into a courtroom, where all groups presented their arguments to the full class, their teacher and two judges (older students taking jurisprudence).After one group presented, the lawyer group representing the opposing side asked critical questions of the members which presenting group responded to.After  arguments were presented and critical questions were asked and points were debated, the judges decided which side presented the more convincing arguments, and therefore won.
Finally, the students reflected on the task in a whole-class activity.

Data material and analytical procedure
This study's primary data source was 360 min of transcribed video recordings of studentgroup interactions during lessons 1 and 2 (Table 1).Video data were collected by head cameras (GoPro) carried by one student in each of the lawyer groups, one in the government group and one with the NGOs.Table 2 outlines the distribution of head cameras in the two lessons.In addition, one video camera captured the whole classroom during all lessons, providing additional camera angles and an overview of group activities.Transcripts from semi-structured focus-group interviews with three student groups and the three teachers engaged in the research project, classroom observation field notes and recordings of whole-class sessions provided supplementary contextual data for the analysis (Derry et al., 2010).We used Martin and White's (2005) appraisal framework for examining attitudes in oral language to analyse the data.Since the data were transcribed in Norwegian, and the appraisal framework was based on English, we adopted and modified Marti's (2021) translation of the framework into Norwegian.The appraisal framework consists of generic categories of meaning with examples; we found students rarely used these exact words.Table 3 provides an overview of attitudes described in the appraisal framework, words that indicate these attitudes and their interpretation in this research.
Due to the complexity of Appraisal framework and because it has not, to our knowledge, been previously used on student-group discussions in classroom settings we had to adapt, making the framework suitable for our data material.The researchers found it useful to analyse transcribed data material collaboratively through several steps.In the first step, the first author extracted all sequences that contained student-group interaction related to the case as well as sequences where the students worked on constructing arguments.In the second step, both authors individually analysed the sequences from step one.Through the third step, the individual analysis was compared and excerpts for in-depth analysis were selected in collaboration.Then, both authors individually analysed the excerpts in the fourth analytical step, which further were compared in a fifth step.During this last step, the researchers discussed interpretations to gain a shared and improved understanding of more challenging utterances, such as utterances that could potentially be coded as both appreciation and judgments, or both as affect and appreciation.Some analysed sequences were shared and discussed with researcher colleagues.

Results
The following section presents analyses of four excerpts drawn from the studentgroup interactions.The first two excerpts (1 and 2) contain transcribed data from a lawyer group; the last two (3 and 4) were taken from a government group.These groups were chosen to represent our results for three main reasons.First, they constitute contrasting patterns of interaction.Second, we avoid variation in assigned position as both groups were representing the government.Third, despite other groups demonstrated similar patterns, the chosen groups were more distinct in their displayed attitudes, and therefore suitable for illustrating how displayed attitudes can impact group-interaction.The assignment of group roles in the trial did not appear to prevent students from expressing their personal positions.The overall frame of a trial suggests the roles were interpreted to be more formal than personal, as the students likely understood that some roles may not align with the actor's personal position in a trial.
Excerpt 1: the lawyer group: group norm of political identity established In the following two excerpts, a lawyer group is constructing critical questions to ask the opposite side in court (Table 1).In excerpt 1, group members express opinions about the Conservative Party of Norway and the Norwegian Labour Party.Both support further petroleum exploration in the Barents Sea: the Conservative Party promotes actively searching for petroleum, while the Labour Party, which collaborates with parties that strongly oppose petroleum exploration, aims to reduce emissions from the petroleum industry.Although the excerpt is not focused on petroleum exploration directly, this indirectly related discussion serves as a starting point for the ensuing conversation (Table 4).Excerpt 1 starts with Endre asking for the group member's personal political standpoint (1).Mette displays two positive attitudes towards the Conservative party: security ('obviously') and happiness ('like').Endre expresses satisfaction with Mette ('yes' and 'good') and asks the same information of Anders (3) using different words.The phrasing of 'you also like the Conservative party, right?' in this question indicates a predetermined assumption that Anders supports the Conservative party.This way of asking conveys an attitude towards the normality of liking the Conservative party.After establishing that Mette and Anders support the Conservative party, Endre mentions the Labour party (7), which makes Anders mimic vomiting sounds (8), which presumedly indicates dislike for the Labour party.The excerpt ends with Endre noting the Labour party also supports petroleum exploration (9).
Analysis of the attitudes displayed in excerpt 1 revealed only positive attitudes towards the Conservative party (2, 3, 6) and only negative attitudes towards the Labour party (8) displayed in the interaction.The attitudes displayed were either strongly positive (2) or strongly negative (8), and strongly positive attitudes towards the Conservative party were positively appreciated by peers (3).This contributes to establishing a group norm of liking the Conservative party.
In the excerpt, none of the students provides further support for liking the Conservative party or disliking the Labour party.Thus, a polarised position is established.The lack of problematisation may be due to all students displaying positive attitudes towards the Conservative party; hence, they had no incentive for further reasoning to validate their first spontaneous feeling.This may contribute to a setting in which students do not feel comfortable sharing conflicting perspectives, which can also affect which attitudes students display.This excerpt established a possible framing for the students' future work.Excerpt 2: the lawyer group: from valuing petroleum exploration to judging consequences of ending it In excerpt 2, the 'lawyers' are still constructing critical questions, as Henrik, whose group represents the government, interrupts the lawyer-group interaction to present several arguments (Table 5).
Only positive attitudes towards petroleum exploration and towards those who support it (the Conservative party) were uncovered in this excerpt (1,3,7,17), and only negative attitudes towards stopping exploration and those against oil drilling (15,16,17,19,22), which aligns with the group norm established in excerpt 1.The excerpt also contains negative judgments about terminating oil exploration (10,11,13).These negative judgments continue in lines 16 and 17, but in the context of implications of the Norwegian Green Party's politics.Only positive attitudes are conveyed towards the quality (4, 5) and veracity (12, 14) of peers' utterances.For example, Mette judging Endre's utterances to be 'true' indicates she considers Endre trustworthy.
The students' displayed attitudes impacted three aspects of their SSI-related reasoning.First, as the students were reasoning about the benefits of oil exploration, the cost of ending exploration and political parties' capacity for and sense of justice, the issue was only considered from one perspective (pro-exploration).The absence of multiple perspectives may relate to the lack of variation in the attitudes displayed.This unchallenged premise of the norm likely led to a one-sided positive perspective on oil exploration.Second, the quality of their reasoning may have been affected by the absence of negative attitudes towards peers' utterances, which may have resulted from all participants sharing the same opinion or from the perception that conveying attitudes inconsistent with the group norm was too costly.Third, the group develops an appreciation for oil exploration grounded in evidence and then presents a series of negative implications.The students reason, but they are not open to multiple perspectives.They perceive any path towards a sustainable society that ends petroleum exploration to lead to a bleak future.
Excerpt 3: the government group: exploring perspectives In the following two excerpts, three students representing the government construct arguments supporting further oil exploration (Table 1).Klara controls the computer and composes the arguments they discuss (Table 6).
Excerpt 3 begins with Selma asking the group their opinion concerning further oil exploration (1).Klara states her opposition to oil drilling (2).Jørn expresses a lack of interest, claiming he does 'not care' (3), while Selma exhibits insecurity about her own position (4).These are distinct types of negative affect.In line 5, the conversation shifts when Klara acknowledges the complexity of taking a stand on oil drilling, nuancing her first exclamation against drilling (2).Selma follows by appreciating the value of oil drilling relative to the Norwegian welfare system (6).Finally, Klara again acknowledges the issue's complexity and further justifies being 'more against' petroleum exploration by referring to its impact on their generation, as they must 'fix so damn much' (7).Here, Klara's use of 'more' also adds to the complexity, while swearing 'damn much' upscales Klara's negative feeling about oil drilling.
Three elements of the impact the displayed attitudes had on the students' reasoning within the excerpt are notable.First, Selma's acknowledgement of the issue's ambiguity The Labour party ('I'm a bit of both') is important because doubt and insecurity open the discussion to more than one voice and position, enabling the students to evaluate multiple perspectives.Second, the variation of directions in attitudes (positive and negative) towards oil exploration may have helped create an environment that prompted students to defend their first affective response to a question, leading to reasoning concerning both costs and benefits of oil drilling.Third, by displaying appreciation for the complexity of taking a stand on the issue, Klara contributed to an environment that allowed the display of attitudes inconsistent with peers', as when Selma displayed a positive appreciation of oil drilling that conflicted with Klara's position against it.Appreciation of complexity also contributed to an important shift in the conversation from affect to complexity, further emphasising the importance of acknowledging the complexity of the task in moving the discussion from 'gut feeling' to reasoning.
Excerpt 4: the government group: focus on representations to develop argument The group is discussing which representation to use in court (Table 1) to support their argument in excerpt 4, presented in Table 7.The focal point of interaction in the excerpt revolves around a visual representation depicting the distribution of employees across different industries (Figure 2).In excerpt 4, Klara and Selma question the usefulness of the representation (Figure 1).This represents a significant divergence from the previous examples, as they are discussing the representation rather than the phenomenon it represents.The representation is judged through the appreciation of negative quality (1, 3), value (2) and composition (3), and then Klara acknowledges the complexity of constructing arguments in favour of further oil exploration (4), representing a shift in the conversation from positive appreciation of the representation to negative appreciation of the quality of arguments that support further oil exploration (5-7).In line 8, Jørn suggests 'life is hard without a moustache' as an argument.This joke can indicate insecurity or restlessness prompted by the conversation.Jørn's joke contributes to a second shift in the conversation.At first Klara and Selma appreciate the joke (9-11) negatively, but later the joke seems to have focused Klara's and Selma's attention on constructing the best arguments (10,11).Klara positively judges oil exploration as being compatible with the Paris Agreement and appreciates its value for the labour marked (11).Selma follows with positive appreciation of the economic value of oil drilling (12).In the final utterance, Klara positively appreciates the value of oil exploration for the next generation.The analysis of attitudes displayed in excerpt 4 revealed the excerpt consists primarily of appreciations; however, the direction of the appreciation varies as students express both negative and positive appreciation for arguments supporting further oil exploration.
The reasoning in the excerpt deals with the quality of arguments and benefits of further oil drilling, and as in excerpt 3, the group does consider several perspectives (Norwegians, next generation and challenging one's own perspective).The use of a sarcastic tone (3, 6, 7) represents a particular voice or position, while also distancing from it.However, the students tend to focus on the representations and their role in developing an argument.This is an important shift in focus compared to the other groups, as it calls for a distinction between 'content' and its representation, adding a new layer of complexity absent from the previous excerpts.Further, the students anticipated peers' responses to their developing arguments: in excerpt 4, the importance of appreciating composition and complexity is recognised (lines 3, 4), and in excerpt 3, acknowledging the complexity allows room for considering multiple perspectives.
Table 8 summarises the analysis of the four excerpts regarding appraisal patterns and discourse patterns.The discourse category interprets the appraisal pattern relative to the context of the interaction and its flow.

Discussion
This study was intended to provide insights into the ways attitudes in student-group interactions emerge and influence the reasoning of students engaged in an SSI related to climate change.Understanding how attitudes emerge in unfolding discourses and influence reasoning is vital to developing teaching practices that support the development of student competencies needed to cope with and act against such matters as environmental degradation, as with climate change.To provide insight into the impact of attitudes displayed in students' reasoning, we posed two research questions: (a) How do attitudes emerge in student-group interactions concerning an SSI related to climate change?(b) How do displayed attitudes affect reasoning during student-group interactions related to SSIs? Table 8 summarises initial answers to these questions.Further elaborations follow.
Two groups showed distinct patterns of attitudes and reasoning practices.

The lawyer group
Analysis of attitudes in the lawyer group (excerpts 1 and 2) demonstrated the strong, positive attitudes the students displayed towards petroleum exploration and towards those in favour of it (the Conservative party) and their negative attitudes towards ending oil drilling and towards those against petroleum exploration (such as the Green Party).This polarised and unequivocal stance, together with only positive attitudes towards peers' utterances (trustworthiness and quality), imply only two positions were possible: the group adopted one of them.In the later excerpt, the students gave reasons for and supported their position through appreciation and claiming negative implications from shutting down oil exploration.The strong, positive affect expressing security and strong like/dislike positions in excerpt 1 sustained a polarised discourse that became a significant framing, even as the students, in excerpt 2, appreciated different valuations and qualities and made judgments.

The government group
The analysis of attitudes in excerpts 3 and 4 illustrated the government group expressed affect towards both positionsfor and against further petroleum explorationleading Klara to appreciate the complexity of the issue and the group to appreciate both positive and negative aspects of oil exploration.Another layer of complexity was introduced when they considered representations as means for argumentation.
In the government group, insecurity and dissatisfaction, which can involve troublesome emotions, seemed constructive by facilitating the recognition of complexity and multiple perspectives.Their focus on representations in their argument added another layer as they could discuss an representation as part of an argument.
Based on findings from both groups and previous SSR studies, different patterns of displayed attitudes can have implications for students' SSR.As depicted in Figure 3, despite displaying strong, positive affect towards the Conservative party, the lawyer group reasoned about the cost of closing the petroleum industry, but because they did not move beyond cause and effect, they did not recognise the complexity of the issue (Kinslow et al., 2019).Further, as they continued to display only positive attitudes towards petroleum exploration and only negative attitudes towards ending it, they also failed to consider multiple perspectives.Identifying the inherent complexity is a first step in SSR, and an important step in order for students to reach higher order aspects of SSR (Romine et al., 2017;Romine et al., 2020;Sadler et al., 2007); thus, the lack of higher order aspects of SSR in the government group may be due to their failure to identify the complexity of the issue.
The government group moved from complexity towards perspective-taking.As depicted in Figure 4, the variety of affects towards oil exploration contributed to appreciation of the issue's complexity, which relates to recognising complexity in SSR.Furthermore, this contributed to students' display of negative and positive attitudes towards oil exploration, representing an additional component of reasoning as they considered multiple perspectives and reasoned about their complexity.Negative appreciation of the quality of arguments and peers' utterances contributed to an inquiry discourse in which students demonstrated scepticism towards the representations (diagram) and arguments.These insights agree with findings that identify perspective-taking as crucial to SSR (Kahn & Zeidler, 2019;Kinslow et al., 2019;Romine et al., 2017;Romine et al., 2020) and demonstrate that varied affects and appreciation of complexity impact whether students move from complexity towards perspective-taking.These findings indicate displayed affect towards SSIs in a group interaction can influence active reasoning and the aspects of SSR students perceive.The presence of doubt was important for complexity to be recognised and for inquiry to manifest.These findings relate to Simonneaux and Simonneaux's (2009b) finding that students with high emotional proximity to an issue failed to reach higher level aspects of SSR, as our findings indicate the lawyer group's strong affect towards the issue hindered their SSR.
In line with Chang et al. (2018), our findings also emphasise the need for educators of SSIs to consider attitudes when planning SSI lessons for and interacting with students.Although we did not measure pre/post-learning attitudes, our findings indicate prelearning attitudes displayed in group interactions can indirectly impact students' postlearning attitudes.First, displayed attitudes impacted the variety of directions in which attitudes were displayed.Second, displayed attitudes affected the quality of reasoning, which can polarise students' attitudes (as may have happened in the lawyer group) or prompt them to critically examine their attitudes (e.g. the government group).SSI teaching should aim for the latter (Kahn & Zeidler, 2019;Sadler et al., 2007;Sadler & Zeidler, 2005;Simonneaux & Simonneaux, 2009b).
To summarise, analysing factors that impact reasoning in group interactions when students engage in SSI-related discourse is vital to preparing future generations to address SSIs like climate change.In this study, we applied the appraisal framework to excerpts from group interactions to analyse the role of displayed attitudes in studentgroup interactions and gained insights into attitude patterns and discovered the significant role that affect and appreciation of complexity have in the reasoning process.As our study was limited to one class and one topic, our results are likely not covering the full variation of the phenomenon on a larger span of classes, types of SSI, or teaching contexts.However, even though our fine grained analysis presented in this article covers only two groups, we observed similar patterns in the other groups.We would however encourage more research on the role of attitudes in group interactions in a greater range of contexts and SSI themes.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Four representations the groups received during the group task.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Statistics Norway representation 'Employed persons by main group of industry', containing numbers of employees in various industries, including petroleum industry, with the fewest employees.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Displayed attitudes in lawyer group and their relation to aspect of SSR without students' leaving a polarised framing.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Displayed attitudes in government group and their relation to aspect of SSR, where students move from complexity to perspective-taking and demonstrate scepticism; the discourse can be categorised as inquiry.

Table 1 .
Activities completed during three lessons and their duration.

Table 2 .
Gathered video-data of group interactions and number of participants in each group.

Table 3 .
Realisations of types of affect, judgment and appreciation from the literature and the current study.
) The Labour party are just as much in fauvor of oil drilling [No one responds, and the group goes on to discuss the representations.]

Table 5 .
Excerpt 2. So, the way Norway makes money-it does not work if the Green Party get it the way they want it 13 Endre: Aha, also we can-Do you know (.) Something else we can use is fishing (.)But then we overfish (.)And that's not sustainable (.) So--Judgment: propriety To replace oil drilling with fishing 14 Mette: That's true + Judgment: veracity Endre's utterance 15 Endre:

Table 8 .
Summary of analysis.