Building Arguments Together or Alone? Using Learning Analytics to Study the Collaborative Construction of Argument Diagrams

Research has shown that the construction of visual representations may have a positive effect on cognitive skills, including argumentation. In this paper we present a study on learning argumentation through computer-supported argument diagramming. We specifically focus on whether students, when provided with an argument-diagramming tool, create better diagrams, are more motivated, and learn more when working with other students or on their own. We use learning analytics to evaluate a variety of student activities: pre and post questionnaires to explore motivational changes; the argument diagrams created by students to evaluate richness, complexity and completion; and pre and post knowledge tests to evaluate learning gains

Deweyan tools for inquiry and the epistemological context of critical pedagogy

This article develops the notion of resistance as articulated in the literature of critical pedagogy as being both culturally sponsored and cognitively manifested. To do so, the authors draw upon John Dewey\u27s conception of tools for inquiry. Dewey provides a way to conceptualize student resistance not as a form of willful disputation, but instead as a function of socialization into cultural models of thought that actively truncate inquiry. In other words, resistance can be construed as the cognitive and emotive dimensions of the ongoing failure of institutions to provide ideas that help individuals both recognize social problems and imagine possible solutions. Focusing on Dewey\u27s epistemological framework, specifically tools for inquiry, provides a way to grasp this problem. It also affords some innovative solutions; for instance, it helps conceive of possible links between the regular curriculum and the study of specific social justice issues, a relationship that is often under-examined. The aims of critical pedagogy depend upon students developing dexterity with the conceptual tools they use to make meaning of the evidence they confront; these are background skills that the regular curriculum can be made to serve even outside social justice-focused curricula. Furthermore, the article concludes that because such inquiry involves the exploration and potential revision of students\u27 world-ordering beliefs, developing flexibility in how one thinks may be better achieved within academic subjects and topics that are not so intimately connected to students\u27 current social lives, especially where students may be directly implicated

Family unity objectives of parents who teach their children: Ideological and pedagogical orientations to home schooling

This article examines parents who teach their children at home. Using the results from two qualitative studies the article suggests, while families have complex motives for teaching their children at home, an important commonality underlies their decision. Regardless of their orientation to home schooling the parents in these two studies felt that establishing a home school would allow them to maintain or further develop unity within the family. The article suggests a family's decision to home school is often made in an attempt to resist the effects on the family unit of urbanization and modernization. The policy implications of this finding are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43875/1/11256_2005_Article_BF01112403.pd

Destabilizing anti-gay environments through gay-straight alliances: Possibilities and limitations through shifting discourses.

Drawing upon research with Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) advisors, high-school principals, and two district-level administrators, we examine the potential and limits of the safe-space discourse that encompasses the aims of GSAs. We argue that this discourse conceals heteronormative school environments, which supplies the groundwork for hostility perpetrated against LGBT students. We then delineate three strategies- organizational, pedagogical, and systemic-toward altering the safe-space discourse to a forward-looking, social-justice discourse that fosters the eradication of heteronormative school processes