Establishing an argumentation environment to foster scientific reasoning with Bio-World (original) (raw)

Bio-World is an interactive learning environment designed to support the acquisition of scientific reasoning skills in high school students. It integrates a variety of cognitive tools to assist in scaffolding scientific reasoning activity. A recent addition to Bio-World provides further support for scientific reasoning by providing an argumentation environment. In the argumentation environment, the learner is engaged in explicitly justifying hypotheses with evidence; organizing, categorizing, and rating the evidence; and constructing a final summary argument. As students construct arguments to defend their hypotheses, Bio-World monitors their actions and determines the kind of advice or hints to generate in response to student requests. This paper describes the cognitive basis for the argumentation environment, presents the implementation of Bio-World's evidence palette, and describes how argumentation knowledge is used in student modelling and advice generation.