Facilitating classroom argumentation with computer technology (original) (raw)
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How can we foster sound argumentation and valid criticism in education? How to help students to avoid fallacies, resist polarization, respond wisely to misleading information, and how to make them produce arguments that are genuinely responsive to the position of those they address? I sketch a dialogical account of the nature of sound argument and criticism. Then, I discuss two types of argumentative dialogue: persuasion dialogue and negotiation dialogue. Finally, I explain how software applications provide an opportunity for students to analyse, evaluate and produce arguments, and to critically think about the design of discussion procedures. I also discuss a third software application that enables teachers and advanced students to themselves design online discussion procedures, so as to experiment with them and to advance their understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of various design choices. This paper support the idea that students’ argumentative skills will be enhanc...
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Argumentation is omnipresent in our lives and therefore an important skill to learn. While classic face-to-face argumentation and debate has advantages in helping people learn to argue better, it does not scale up, limited by teacher time and availability. Computer-supported argumentation (CSA) is a viable alternative in learning to argue, currently increasing in popularity. In this paper, we present results from a survey we conducted with experts on argumentation learning systems, one which provides a glimpse on future directions.
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Argumentation skills are highly valued in both education and business. As a process, participating in argumentation helps a person to develop their meta-cognitive and higher-order thinking abilities. This paper reports on empirical results on middle-school students' changes in attitudes towards argumentation as part of an ongoing design-based research study. Past attempts by researchers to foster students' argumentation skills have met with mixed results. General Web-based discussion boards often do not provide the structures and process scaffolds to help students acquire the target skill. In this study, a web-based structured argumentation board with sentence openers as scaffolds was designed to support students' engagement with argumentation over a four week long intervention. Two questionnaires, a pre-post and a post-then-pre, were designed to measure students' attitudes towards argumentation. The two questionnaires were used to identify any treatment dependent &q...
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The ability to engage in reasoned discussion is a skill that is needed in many different workplace and community contexts. The capacity to argue effectively can enhance an individual’s democratic participation in contemporary society through, for example, online communication with political representatives, or participation in the political blogosphere. Yet studies have shown that many citizens’ argumentation skills are ‘only of the most elementary sort’ (Kuhn 1991, 264). This is despite the fact that both the process (argumentation) and the product (argument) of putting forward and negotiating ideas and perspectives is a fundamental aim of education. Educational argumentation, and the methods and tools of analysis for investigating it, are the focus of this special edition. In combination, the papers present an array of different means by which educational argumentation is currently being researched by key scholars in the field. The methods discussed have been shaped by a number of...