Project Title

Fostering students' argumentation skills through the use of a scaffolded argumentation board



Overview

Argumentation skills are highly valued in education and business. They reflect a person’s ability to frame a claim in a coherent and persuasive way, providing supportable reasons for the claim as well as identifying the often implicit warrants (or assumptions) underlying the claim. As a process, participating in argumentation helps a person to understand his or her own position more clearly in the light of counter claims or rebuttals made by others. Argumentation skills are particularly relevant to science education and to problem solving. In the former, they help students understand science making as a process of evidence-based social construction. In the latter, they help students consider and evaluate alternative solutions to ill-structured problems in a critical and rigorous manner. The development of argumentation skills helps students to develop their metacognitive and higher-order thinking abilities because argumentation requires individuals to externalise and explicitly reflect on their own thinking. Past attempts by researchers to foster students’ argumentation skills have met with mixed results. General discussion boards do not provide the structures and process scaffolds to help students acquire the target skill. Research into structured discussion boards is limited and has to date been inconclusive. In this project, we seek to design and develop a web-based scaffolded argumentation learning environment that will help students to internalise the structure of rigorous argumentation. Using a design-based research approach, we plan to test the use of this board with schoolchildren in the domains of scientific argumentation and problem solving.

Project Reference

LSL 6/05 CYS