Socioscientific Reasoning (SSR) is the reasoning practices that a person uses to make sense of and think of solutions for SocioScientific Issues (SSI). In 2016, Romine et al. designed a Quantitative Assessment of Socioscientific Reasoning (QuASSR) to assess and characterize SSR; however, characterization of the independent dimension of SSR was not achieved. Our study builds upon and improves QuaSSR by using a new model of epistemic cognition called the vAIR model, which is a community-oriented framework that accounts for limitations of the previous SSR model. The vAIR model of SSR is designed to more clearly distinguish the dimensions of SSR and their interactions in evaluating information in the context of how students reason through a complex issue regarding their school and their diet. The instrument’s design consists of a survey-type assessment programmed to select personally meaningful context through a series of questions and then present the participant with an argument exchange
scenario, embedded with elements of SSR, that asks them to evaluate and choose which side makes the best arguments based. The instrument records the participants' selections and helps observe epistemic cognition patterns that can help us understand how SSR takes place and how it is affected by epistemic dimensions.