Constructing representations of arguments

Students working with multiple conflicting documents on a scientific issue: Relations between epistemic cognition while reading and sourcing and argumentation in essays

“…The statement, 'use of cell phones can cause tumours in the brain (claim) because such tumours often occur in people who use their cell phones frequently (reason)', may illustrate a minimum argument. In an argument schema, the claim is pivotal and all other information is organized as support (reasons), opposition (counters) or limitation (qualifiers and rebuttals) for the main claim (Britt & Larson, 2003). Good arguments are expected to avoid one-sidedness and take into account competing or conflicting perspectives (i.e., counterarguments) and the evidence that supports them (Kuhn, 1991;Reznitskaya, Kuo, Glina, & Anderson, 2009;Wolfe, Britt, & Butler, 2009).…”

“…In scoring the essays for argumentative reasoning, we used a slight adaptation of Reznitskaya et al's (2009) holistic scoring rubric, which focuses on several macro-level features that indicate the overall schematic structure acquired by the students and used in the essays. This rubric is used to rate the overall quality of written argumentation on a 7-point scale and is consistent with theoretical assumptions regarding argumentation (e.g., Britt & Larson, 2003;Reznitskaya & Anderson, 2002;Toulmin, 1958). Our adaptation of the rubric involved that we reformulated 'discussing opposing perspective' to 'discussing opposing perspective(s) and the unsettled nature of the issue'.…”

Verstehen von Argumenten in wissenschaftlichen Texten

“…Ein Schlüssel für das Verstehen und die Bewertung von Argumenten ist die Fähigkeit, die Struktur eines Arguments, das heißt, die verschiedenen Argumentkomponenten korrekt zu erkennen (Britt & Larson, 2003;Larson, Britt & Larson, 2004). Zur Erfassung dieser Fähigkeit wurde im Rahmen vorausgehender Studien der Argumentstrukturtest 1 (AST; von der Mühlen, Richter, Schmid, Schmidt & Berthold, 2016) entwickelt und erfolgreich eingesetzt.…”

Learning as an epistemic activity / El aprendizaje como actividad epistémica

“…Forming an adequate representation of an argument requires learners to identify its components. Identifying the claim is the key to argument comprehension as arguments are represented hierarchically, with the claim holding the top position in the representation (Britt & Larson, 2003). However, whereas scientific communication is, at least in part, organized in a way that makes it easy for readers to identify argument components and form adequate representations, in many materials that learners encounter, argument structures are implicit or even obscured.…”

“…Many texts that learners encounter during formal and informal learning do not make it easy for learners to identify arguments and 'parse' their structure. For example, arguments may also lack linguistic markers that help learners to identify their components and infer their relationships, especially claim, reason(s) and their relationship (e.g., connectives such as 'therefore' or 'because', epistemic verbs such as 'support' or 'contradict', modal verbs such as 'should' or 'could', or qualifiers such as 'perhaps' or 'likely') (Britt & Larson, 2003). Moreover, as mentioned above, arguments are prevalent not only in argumentative texts, where one might expect them, but in many types of texts and learning materials, including expository texts.…”