Mark Felton

The development of argumentive discourse skill.

College students who supported opposing positions on abortion were asked to state their reasons for and against their own position as well as their reason for and against the opposition. Students then served as judges on 4 cases in which women were seeking an abortion. The circumstances motivating a woman varied across the 4 cases. Case information either challenged or supported prototypic assumptions and beliefs that underlie a prolife or prochoice stance. Students who received information directly challenging their position on abortion changed stances more frequently than those who did not. Three additional factors also predicted changes in stances: (a) taking a prochoice rather than a prolife position, (b) being able to cite more problems with ones own position, and (c) receiving challenging cases that present novel rather than anticipated conditions motivating a womans desire for abortion. The results are discussed in terms of a process model of conceptual change and learning, where changes in stanc...The skills involved in argument as a social discourse activity presumably develop during the childhood and adolescent years, but little is known about the course of that development. As an initial step in examining this development, a coding system was developed for the purpose of analyzing multiple dialogues between peers on the topic of capital punishment. A comparison of the dialogues of young adolescents and those of young adults showed the teens to be more preoccupied with producing the dialogue and less able to behave strategically with respect to the goals of argumentive discourse. Teens also did not exhibit the strategic skill that adults did of adapting discourse to the requirements of particular argumentive contexts (agreeing vs. disagreeing dialogues).Argumentation constitutes 1 of the most common forms of human interaction. Yet despite its pervasiveness, relatively little psychological research has been conducted on the topic. This article serves as an introduction to this research and has 2 goals. One is to discuss a number of general issues relevant to the study of argumentation, including the definition, goals and functions, structure, evaluation of arguments and argumentation, and the relation of narrativity and argumentation. The 2nd goal is to describe some examples of the existing psychological research on argumentation, with emphasis on articles in this special issue. Topics include argumentation by children, argumentation skill, writing argumentative text, argumentation and case-based change, argumentation and critical thinking, and argumentation and narrativity in a legal context.This article examines the effects of participation in oral argumentation on the development of individual reasoning as expressed in persuasive essays. Engagement in oral argumentation is the essential feature of a classroom discussion method called collaborative reasoning. A premise of this method is that reasoning is fundamentally dialogical and, hence, the development of reasoning is best nurtured in supportive dialogical settings such as group discussion. Students from 3 classrooms participated in collaborative reasoning discussions for a period of 5 weeks. Then, these students and students from 3 comparable classrooms who had not engaged in collaborative reasoning wrote persuasive essays. The essays of collaborative reasoning students contained a significantly greater number of relevant arguments, counter-arguments, rebuttals, formal argument devices, and uses of text information.Argumentation was studied in a courtroom context in which the prosecuting attorney’s summary is assumed to be an argument with “X is guilty” as the claim and the narrative, which contains the evidence of the case, providing support for the claim. In Experiment 1, quality of evidence, narrative coherence, and gender were studied. In Experiments 2A and 2B the role of uncertainty of narrative information, emotional expressions in the narrative, and gender were studied. Both crime-related and non-crime-related uncertain information produced lower guilt ratings and lower ratings of narrative goodness than the baseline, suggesting jury doubt occurs with any narrative uncertainty. Victim-related emotional expressions produced lower guilt ratings than the baseline, although these were mediated by the particular story read. Effects of defendant-related emotional expressions depended on gender and narrative contents. The gender results suggest men respond more heuristically, focusing primarily on evidence, whereas women process the narrative more comprehensively.The emergence and development of argumentation skills in interpersonal conflict situations are the focus of this study. The mental structures used to understand arguments are related to those used to understand social conflict and goal-directed action. The desire to maintain or dissolve a relationship, to persuade, and to understand a position operate throughout interpersonal arguments. Decisions made about whether a relationship should be maintained influence the reasoning and thinking during negotiation, the negotiation strategies, and the outcome of an argument. Because social goals are crucial to understanding argument, negotiations and memory for an argument may be affected as to bias and accuracy. The ability to understand an argument is claimed to emerge early in development. By 3 years of age, children understand and generate the principle components of an argument, either in face-to-face interaction or individual interviews. The ability to construct detailed, coherent rationales in defense of a f...

Developing Historical Reading and Writing with Adolescent Readers: Effects on Student Learning.

Abstract In this study, the effects of a disciplinary reading and writing curriculum intervention with professional development are shared. We share our instructional approach and provide writing outcomes for struggling adolescent readers who read at or below basic proficiency levels, as well as writing outcomes for proficient and advanced readers. Findings indicate significant and meaningful growth of about 0.5 of 1 standard deviation in students’ abilities to write historical arguments and in the length of their essays for all participants, including struggling readers. Our study also considers teacher implementation of the curriculum intervention. We found that teachers who were most faithful to the underlying constructs of our curriculum intervention also made successful adaptations of the lesson materials.

Implementing a Disciplinary-Literacy Curriculum for US History: Learning from Expert Middle School Teachers in Diverse Classrooms.

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents’ understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers’ efforts to implement curriculum that integrates reading, writing and thinking in history with academically diverse eighth graders. We conduct qualitative analyses of teacher observations and interviews as well as student work. This analysis provides insight into several issues that emerge in efforts to teach disciplinary literacy in history classrooms: the nuances of teachers’ use of curriculum materials created by people other than themselves, teachers’ appropriation and adaptation of curriculum materials and teachers’ understanding of curriculum materials and disciplinary literacy goals. We find that teachers’ knowledge of the discipline and attention to students’ ideas allowed them to skillfully adapt the curriculum to better meet students’ needs and push students’ thinking. Orienting teachers toward disciplinary learning, ensuring a foundational understanding of their discipline and providing teachers with tools to teach disciplinary literacy are important steps to help students meet the demands of the disciplinary literacy agenda.

Arguing to Agree: Mitigating My-Side Bias Through Consensus-Seeking Dialogue.

Research has shown that novice writers tend to ignore opposing viewpoints when framing and developing arguments in writing, a phenomenon commonly referred to as my-side bias. In the present article, we contrast two forms of argumentative discourse conditions (arguing to persuade and arguing to reach consensus) and examine their differential effects on my-side bias in writing. Our data reveal that when asked to write an essay to support their opinions on capital punishment, individuals who had argued to reach consensus were more likely to cite claims that challenge their position, reconcile these claims with their position, and make use of claims that had originally been introduced by their dialogue partners. We discuss these findings in light of educational policy and practice and caution against an overemphasis on using persuasive discourse as a means of teaching argumentative reasoning and writing.

The Effect of Task Instructions on Students’ Use of Repetition in Argumentative Discourse

The reasoning belief of argumentum ad nauseam assumes that when someone repeats something often enough, he or she becomes more convincing. The present paper analyses the use of this strategy by seventh-grade students in an argumentation task. Sixty-five students (mean age: 12.2, SD = 0.4) from a public school in a mid-sized urban environment took part in the study. The students were asked to either argue to convince an opposing partner or argue to reach consensus with an opposing partner on three dilemmas that dealt with energy sources. Data were gathered according to a between-groups design that included one independent variable (argumentative goal: to convince vs. to reach consensus) and one dependent variable (the degree of argumentative repetitions). We predicted that in the condition to convince their partner, the students would use the repetition strategy more often in their attempts to be persuasive. Our findings show that the mean number of argumentative repetitions was significantly higher for the persuasion group for both of the most frequent argumentative structures (claim and claim data). The mean percentage of repeated claims for the persuasion condition was 86.2 vs. 69.0 for the consensus condition. For the claim data, the mean percentage for the persuasion group was 35.2 vs. 24.3 for the consensus group. Also, students in the persuasion group tended to repeat one idea many times rather than repeating many ideas a few times within the same argumentative structure. The results of our study support the hypothesis that the goal of the argumentative task mediates argumentative discourse and, more concretely, the rate of repetitions and the conceptual diversity of the statements. These differences in rates of repetition and conceptual diversity are related to the amount of learning produced by the instructional goal. We apply Mercers idea that not all classroom argumentation tasks promote learning equally.

How Do I Know? The Epistemological Roots of Critical Thinking

Abstract Museum educators often think about what they want children to take away with them from museum visits. But at least as important is what children bring to these visits. Research in developmental psychology shows that children and adolescents progress through a sequence of ways of understanding knowledge and knowing—understanding that lies at the core of museum experiences. Museum educators should be aware of these different ways of understanding and how they may (or may not) support peoples museum experiences. In this article we describe this sequence of understandings and consider ways in which educators can support progression to its most advanced level—one at which inquiry, analysis, evaluation, and debate are valued and regarded as worth the intellectual effort they require.