86,188 research outputs found

    Learning to Argue From Others’ Erroneous Arguments – Fostering Argumentation Competence Through Learning From Advocatory Errors

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    Argumentation competence is an essential skill to be acquired in university education. However, there is a lack of advanced argumentation competence even for graduate students. To foster argumentation competence, typical interventions focus on examplebased learning. Another approach is learning from advocatory errors. The combination of both approaches is presenting examples of erroneous arguments. Drawing on the concept of case-based learning, we developed a learning intervention that presents examples of argumentation errors in story-based designs, i.e., the erroneous examples are embedded in a story featuring the argumentation between two persons in an authentic setting. In this contribution, we report the results of two studies. In a first study, we compared an experimental condition receiving a story-based learning intervention with a control condition without a learning intervention. We found that learning from advocatory errors in a story-based design fosters students’ argumentation competence. In a second study, we compared two forms of instructional support (elaboration vs. testing prompts) against a control condition without instructional support. There was a significant increase in argumentation competence in both conditions with instructional support but not in the control condition. The results also support the cautious conclusion that elaboration prompts seem to be more effective than testing prompts. Overall, the results from both studies indicate that the story-based design is apt to foster students’ argumentation competence. We also considered the impact of prior argumentation competence and found in both studies that the present level of argumentation competence is a factor determining the argumentation competence after learning

    Development of the Critical Thinking Toolkit (CriTT): a measure of student attitudes and beliefs about critical thinking

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    Critical thinking is an important focus in higher education and is essential for good academic achievement. We report the development of a tool to measure critical thinking for three purposes: (i) to evaluate student perceptions and attitudes about critical thinking, (ii) to identify students in need of support to develop their critical thinking, and (iii) to predict academic performance. Seventy-seven items were generated from focus groups, interviews and the critical thinking literature. Data were collected from 133 psychology students. Factor Analysis revealed three latent factors based on a reduced set of 27 items. These factors were characterised as: Confidence in Critical Thinking; Valuing Critical Thinking; and Misconceptions. Reliability analysis demonstrated that the sub-scales were reliable. Convergent validity with measures of grade point average and argumentation skill was shown, with significant correlations between subscales and validation measures. Most notably, in multiple regression analysis, the three sub-scales from the new questionnaire substantially increased the variance in grade point average accounted for by measures of reflective thinking and argumentation. To sum, the resultant scale offers a measure that is simple to administer, can be used as a diagnostic tool to identify students who need support in developing their critical thinking skills, and can also predict academic performance

    Argument Mining with Structured SVMs and RNNs

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    We propose a novel factor graph model for argument mining, designed for settings in which the argumentative relations in a document do not necessarily form a tree structure. (This is the case in over 20% of the web comments dataset we release.) Our model jointly learns elementary unit type classification and argumentative relation prediction. Moreover, our model supports SVM and RNN parametrizations, can enforce structure constraints (e.g., transitivity), and can express dependencies between adjacent relations and propositions. Our approaches outperform unstructured baselines in both web comments and argumentative essay datasets.Comment: Accepted for publication at ACL 2017. 11 pages, 5 figures. Code at https://github.com/vene/marseille and data at http://joonsuk.org

    Scientific Argumentation as a Foundation for the Design of Inquiry-Based Science Instruction

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    Despite the attention that inquiry has received in science education research and policy, a coherent means for implementing inquiry in the classroom has been missing [1]. In recent research, scientific argumentation has received increasing attention for its role in science and in science education [2]. In this article, we propose that organizing a unit of instruction around building a scientific argument can bring inquiry practices together in the classroom in a coherent way. We outline a framework for argumentation, focusing on arguments that are central to science—arguments for the best explanation. We then use this framework as the basis for a set of design principles for developing a sequence of inquiry-based learning activities that support students in the construction of a scientific argument. We show that careful analysis of the argument that students are expected to build provides designers with a foundation for selecting resources and designing supports for scientific inquiry. Furthermore, we show that creating multiple opportunities for students to critique and refine their explanations through evidence-based argumentation fosters opportunities for critical thinking, while building science knowledge and knowledge of the nature of science

    Linguistic argumentation and logic: An alternative method approach in Arabic grammar

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    Rozprawa podkreśla związek między językową argumentacją a logiką. Argumentacja językowa jest systemem językowym, który stosuje znaczenie wyrażeń ujętych w zdania do zarysowania pełnego znaczenia zdań, w nich bowiem konstytuują się zależności między wyrażeniami. Rzeczywiście, to powiązanie między wyrażeniami wzmacnia całościowe znaczenie począwszy od samych podstaw struktury zdania w logicznym powiązaniu idei. W nim znajduje się relacja między słowami a umysłem, zależna od logiki powiązanych ze sobą wypowiedzi. Aby podkreślić znaczenie przedstawionego wyżej sposobu myślenia, autorka zwraca się ku teorii wczesnej gramatyki arabskiej, ogniskującej się raczej wokół analogii niż anomalii. Nastawienie w systemie na analogię opiera się na podstawowej teorii, która implikuje wspomnianą wyżej relację, choć niektóre współczesne ujęcia odrzucają tę interpretację. W podsumowaniu swojej analizy, autorka uwzględnia podobne teorie gramatyki łacińskiej, które wykazują nastawienie logiczne, będące następstwem powiązania językowej argumentacji z logiką. Konkludując, autorka stwierdza, iż powiązanie słów i logiki okazuje się pojęciem uniwersalnym

    The role of individual and social variables in task performance.

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    This paper reports on a data-based study in which we explored - as part of a larger-scale British-Hungarian research project - the effects of a number of affective and social variables on foreign language (L2) learners’ engagement in oral argumentative tasks. The assumption underlying the investigation was that students’ verbal behaviour in oral task situations is partly determined by a number of non-linguistic and non-cognitive factors whose examination may constitute a potentially fruitful extension of existing task-based research paradigms. The independent variables in the study included various aspects of L2 motivation and several factors characterizing the learner groups the participating students were members of (such as group cohesiveness and intermember relations), as well as the learners’ L2 proficiency and ‘willingness to communicate’ in their L1. The dependent variables involved objective measures of the students’ language output in two oral argumentative tasks (one in the learners’ L1, the other in their L2): the quantity of speech and the number of turns produced by the speakers. The results provide insights into the interrelationship of the multiple variables determining the learners’ task engagement, and suggest a multi-level construct whereby some independent variables only come into force when certain conditions have been met

    From guided to self-regulated performance of domain-general skills

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    The fading of instructional scripts can be regarded as necessary for allowing learners to take over control of their cognitive activities during the acquisition of skills such as argumentation. There is, however, the danger that learners might relapse into novice strategies after script prompts are faded. One possible solution could be monitoring by a peer with respect to the performance of the strategy to be learned. We conducted a 2×2-factorial experiment with 126 participants with fading and peer monitoring as between-subjects factors to test the assumptions that (1) the combination of a faded script and peer monitoring has a positive effect on strategy knowledge compared to only one or none of the two types of support; and (2) this effect is due to a greater amount of self-regulated performance of the strategy after the fading of the script when peer monitoring takes place. The findings support these assumptions

    De invloed van het standpunt op de beoordeling van ad populum-argumentatie

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    This paper presents guidelines for the analysis and evaluation of ad populum argumentation. For both of these tasks the type of standpoint is considered as a relevant factor. The conclusions are based on a critical examination of the argumentation theoretical literature regarding this type of argument and in completing and systematizing the insights drawn from it. ad populum-argumentation supporting a descriptive standpoint can only be reasonable if the appeal to the opinion of a lot of people is supplemented with an extra coordinatively linked argument. ad populum argumentation supporting a prescriptive standpoint should be treated according to its function in two contexts in which it typically occurs: advertising and politics. An analysis of the first context shows that this kind of ad populum actually consists of complex argumentation in which the appeal to the people supports an evaluative standpoint. This kind of ad populum is assessed as unreasonable, albeit for different reasons than provided in the literature. ad populum argumentation in the context of political deliberation ‐ ‘procedural ad populum argumentation’ ‐ is regarded as argumentation that is not inherently fallacious, but still too weak to function as the only support for a policy standpoint. Language Use in Past and Presen
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