Promoting critical, elaborative discussions through a collaboration script and argument diagrams

Abstract

During the past two decades a variety of approaches to support argumentation learning in computer-based learning environments have been investigated. We present an approach that combines argumentation diagramming and collaboration scripts, two methods successfully used in the past individually. The rationale for combining the methods is to capitalize on their complementary strengths: Argument diagramming has been shown to help students construct, reconstruct, and reflect on arguments. However, while diagrams can serve as valuable resources, or even guides, during conversations, they do not provide explicit support for the discussion itself. Collaboration scripts, on the other hand, can provide direct support for the discussion, e.g., through sentence openers that encourage high quality discussion moves. Yet, students often struggle to comply with the rules of a script, as evidenced by both the misuse and nonuse of sentence openers. To try to benefit from the advantages of both of these instructional techniques, while minimizing their disadvantages, we combined and experimented with them within a single instructional environment. In particular, we designed a collaboration script that guides student dyads through a process of analyzing, interrelating and evaluating opposing positions on a contentious topic with a goal to jointly generate a well-reasoned conclusion. We compare a baseline version of the script, one that only involves argument diagramming, with an enhanced version that employs an additional peer critique script, implemented with sentence openers, in which student pairs were assigned the roles of a proponent and a constructive critic. The enhanced version of the script led to positive effects: student discussions contained a higher number of elaborative moves and students assessed their argumentation learning more positively.

Promoting Argumentation Competence: Extending from First- to Second-Order Scaffolding Through Adaptive Fading

“…The underlying rationale for representational guidance tools is to provide learners with graphical representation of the structure of argumentation to support argumentation processes in the form of schematic representation (Schwarz and De Groot 2007), tables (Suthers and Hundhausen 2003), or visualizations (Noroozi et al 2011;Scheuer et al 2013). The underlying rationale for digital dialogue games is based on the dialogic dimension of argumentation that guides students towards desirable argumentative moves and sequences (see Ravenscroft 2007Ravenscroft , 2011 for an overview) such as CoLLeGE (e.g., Ravenscroft and Pilkington 2000), AcademicTalk (e.g., McAlister et al 2004), and InterLoc (e.g., Ravenscroft and McAlister 2006).…”

Scripting to enhance university students’ critical thinking in flipped learning: implications of the delayed effect on science reading literacy

“…Research has shown that collaboration scripts facilitate student collaboration as well as collaboration outcomes. Scheuer, McLaren, Weinberger, and Niebuhr (2014) employed collaboration scripts in conjunction with a visual display of arguments with diagrams on climate ethnics. Results showed that students engaged in more elaborative arguments and demonstrated a more positive attitude in their argumentation learning.…”

“…Individual preparation allows students to develop their own reasoning before being influenced by others and is crucial for successful collaboration (Rummel & Spada, 2005;Scheuer et al, 2014). The Questioning step starts by each student asking questions reciprocally based on the headings and subheadings of the article, whereupon students determine the question list through mutual discussion.…”

Systematic mapping studies on argumentative knowledge construction analysis frameworks towards improving students' higher order thinking skills

“…It shows that there is importance action need to be taken in order to analyze AKC in education especially to foster students' thinking skills to the higher level. Also, most of the AKC studies focusing on the higher education learning (see Table II) since the researchers focusing on how to improve the students' teachers' course which will reflect on how teachers will be able to teach students using HOTS in future [23,25,28,29,33,35,36,37]. Table III shows that the most frequently used or well-known AKC analysis frameworks in education is Toulmin's Model (4 papers) and Simplified Toulmin (2 papers) which is also originated from Toulmin's model.…”