Arguing to learn

Many people think that arguing interferes with learning. They link argumentation to a certain type of oppositional argument that is increasingly prevalent in our media culture. Tannen (1998) analyzed the aggressive types of argument that are frequently seen on talk shows and in the political sphere, where representatives of two opposed viewpoints spout talking points at each other. In these forms of argumentation, the goal is not to work together toward a common position, but simply to score points. All teachers and parents have seen children engaged in this type of argumentation, and most would probably agree that it has little to contribute to education

Collaborative argumentation in academic education

The general purpose of this research is todiscover principles for the design ofeducational tasks that provoke collaborativeargumentation. The specific research questionconcentrates on the relationship betweenquestion asking and argumentation and isexamined in three different collaborativelearning tasks involving advanced universitystudents. These studies aim at providingcriteria for organising educational situationsthat elicit argumentation during which opinionschange and new knowledge is being created,within constraints (course duration, examcriteria, student expectations) set by currenthigher education. We discuss some factorsinfluencing argumentation (the role of thestudent, peer, tutor, task, instruction andmedium) and specific attention is paid toquestion asking. Then we report three studiesconducted at our educational department. Thesestudies involve comparable students, a similardomain, but differ in many other respects: themode of communication (oral, typewritten), thepresence of the tutor, instruction onargumentation and/or question asking, assignedtask goals (competition, consensus), and thetype of required outcome. Each study revealsprominence of different types of questions andquestion generation mechanisms. In addition,the relations found between question asking andargumentation change between studies. Incomparing and interpreting these studies, wediscuss results in the light of provokingcollaborative argumentation in regular academiclearning situations

Quality of collaborative interactions in different CSCL-environments

In the Twins project we study the quality of interactions during collaborative learning in different CSCL-environments. The aim of the research is investigating the effects of synchronous and asynchronous systems and different collaborative tasks on interactions between students. Two experiments were done in which students aged 16-17 years had to write an argumentative text about genetic modification. In both experiments the collaborative task consisted of two phases, a discussion phase and a collaborative writing phase. Two tasks were designed which differed in the discussion phase. The experiment differed in the use of synchronous or asynchronous commu-nication during the discussion phase of the task. Interactions between students are analysed on the variables exploration and co-working in the space of debate