A BSTRACT This article focuses on the analysis of secondary school students' argumentative interactions in England and Finland, within specific face-to-face and computer-based environments. We propose that a combination of learning environments, in conjunction with teacher input and support, is important for developing argumentation skills in the classroom. Face-to-face argumentation, in particular, offers ample opportunity for concentrating on the quality (through deeper exploration) of arguments; such learning can enhance the construction of well-structured arguments often associated with some computer-based environments, such as synchronous computer chat.
Joint construction of new knowledge demands that persons can express their statements in a convincing way and explore other people's arguments constructively. For this reason, more knowledge on different means to support collaborative argumentation is needed. This study clarifies whether structured interaction supports students' critical and elaborative argumentation.The study compares the quality of secondary school students' argumentation during structured and unstructured chat interaction. The data consist of 16 dyadic chat discussions: 8 discussions concerned vivisection and 8 gender equality. Half of the discussions were carried out through structured chat, and the other half through unstructured chat. The results suggest that a structured chat environment evokes counterargumentation, also in topics that do not spontaneously provoke conflicting viewpoints. Further, structured chat seems to equalize communication between females and males. Overall, the results indicate that the further investigation and design of pedagogical means to structure collaborative argumentation is a worthwhile enterprise.
This study investigates whether combining chat discussion and construction of an argument diagram stimulates students to formulate new ideas in practising argumentation. In this study, 16 secondary school students discussed vivisection and gender equality in pairs using both free and structured chat tools. In structured chat, the students selected and completed partial sentences provided by the computer. After the discussion, they jointly constructed either argument diagrams freely based on the previous discussions with an Internet tool or modified a diagram the computer had constructed automatically during the structured chat. The freely constructed diagrams contained more of the students' prior knowledge than the modified diagrams. However, the different types of diagrams did not differ significantly in breadth, depth, or balance of argumentation. Thus, free construction of argument diagrams seems to activate students to incorporate their prior knowledge into those diagrams.
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