Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a research tool to evaluate the quality of school pupils’ scientific argumentation

This pilot study focuses on the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping as a participatory action research tool to investigate young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping is a technique for representing graphically an argumentative dialogue through Questions, Ideas, Pros, Cons and Data. Our research objective is to better understand the usage of Compendium, a Dialogue Mapping software tool, as both (1) a learning strategy to scaffold school pupils’ argumentation and (2) as a method to investigate the quality of their argumentative essays. The participants were a science teacher-researcher, a knowledge mapping researcher and 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. This study draws on multiple data sources: discussion forum, science teacher-researcher’s and pupils’ Dialogue Maps, pupil essays, and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Through qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine the role of Evidence-based Dialogue Maps as a mediating tool in scientific reasoning: as conceptual bridges for linking and making knowledge intelligible; as support for the linearisation task of generating a coherent document outline; as a reflective aid to rethinking reasoning in response to teacher feedback; and as a visual language for making arguments tangible via cartographic conventions

Assessing L2 Argumentation in the UAE Context

In this rapidly changing world, argumentation and critical thinking skills are undeniably crucial for new generations of Emirati students. These skills lay the groundwork for a competitive economy, which is a priority for the UAE in its Vision 2021. Specifically, today’s modern workplaces require workers to evaluate different propositions and develop their own after weighing up these various ideas, and thus the ability to defend arguments in English has become increasingly important for UAE university students in English-medium universities as well as their future professional contexts. Despite this importance, research regarding argumentation and the related critical thinking skills is sorely lacking in the UAE. This chapter delineates how written argumentation was assessed in a timed essay in a mandatory argumentative writing course taken by university freshmen in a government university in the UAE, and how the feedback gleaned from this common assessment was mapped to the teaching curriculum to shed light on the teaching effectiveness and to provide directions for future teaching

Food systems and diets: Facing the challenges of the 21st century

The world is facing a nutrition crisis: approximately three billion people from every one of the world’s 193 countries have low-quality diets. Over the next 20 years, multiple forms of malnutrition will pose increasingly serious threats to global health. Population growth combined with climate change will place increasing stress on food systems, particularly in Africa and Asia where there will be an additional two billion people by 2050. At the same time, rapidly increasing urbanization, particularly in these two regions, will affect hunger and nutrition in complex ways – both positively and negatively. Unless policy makers apply the brakes on overweight, obesity and diet-related disease and accelerate efforts to reduce undernutrition, everyone will pay a heavy price: death, disease, economic losses and degradation of the environment. A response, equivalent to that marshalled to tackle HIV/AIDS, malaria and smoking is needed to meet these challenges. Around the world, coordinated action needs to be accompanied by fundamental shifts in our understanding and in our policy actions. Much more emphasis must be given to positioning agricultural growth as a way to improve diet quality, rather than merely delivering sufficient calories. Food systems need to be repositioned from just supplying food to providing high-quality diets for all. This will require policy initiatives far beyond agriculture to encompass trade, the environment and health, which harness the power of the private sector and empower consumers to demand better diets. This report is a call to action for world leaders and their governments. Leadership and commitment will be essential in driving forward the decisions set out in this report and in delivering the necessary priority actions to reshape the global food system

Scaffolding School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation with Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps

This chapter reports pilot work investigating the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping to scaffold young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Our research objective is to better understand pupils’ usage of dialogue maps created in Compendium to write scientific ex-planations. The participants were 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. Through qualitative analysis of three case studies, we investigate the value of dialogue mapping as a mediating tool in the scientific reasoning process during a set of learning activities. These activities were published in an online learning envi-ronment to foster collaborative learning. Pupils mapped their discussions in pairs, shared maps via the online forum and in plenary discussions, and wrote essays based on their dialogue maps. This study draws on these multiple data sources: pupils’ maps in Compendium, writings in science and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Our analysis highlights the diversity of ways, both successful and unsuccessful, in which dialogue mapping was used by these young teenagers

Learning to Teach Argumentation: Research and development in the science classroom

The research reported in this study focuses on an investigation into the teaching of argumentation in secondary science classrooms. Over a one-year period, a group of 12 teachers from schools in the greater London area attended a series of workshops to develop materials and strategies to support the teaching of argumentation in scientific contexts. Data were collected at the beginning and end of the year by audio and video recording lessons where the teachers attempted to implement argumentation. To assess the quality of argumentation, analytical tools derived from Toulmin's argument pattern (TAP) were developed and applied to classroom transcripts. Analysis shows there was development in teachers' use of argumentation across the year. Results indicate that the pattern of use of argumentation is teacher-specific, as is the nature of change. To inform future professional development programmes, transcripts of five teachers, three showing a significant change and two no change, were analysed in more detail to identify features of teachers' oral contributions that facilitated and supported argumentation. The analysis showed that all teachers attempted to encourage a variety of processes involved in argumentation and that the teachers whose lessons included the highest quality of argumentation (TAP analysis) also encouraged higher order processes in their teaching. The analysis of teachers' facilitation of argumentation has helped to guide the development of in-service materials and to identify the barriers to learning in the professional development of less experienced teachers

Elective Modernism and the Politics of (Bio) Ethical Expertise

In this essay I consider whether the political perspective of third wave science studies – ‘elective modernism’ – offers a suitable framework for understanding the policy-making contributions that (bio)ethical experts might make. The question arises as a consequence of the fact that I have taken inspiration from the third wave in order to develop an account of (bio)ethical expertise. I offer a précis of this work and a brief summary of elective modernism before considering their relation. The view I set out suggests that elective modernism is a political philosophy and that although its use in relation to the use of scientific expertise in political and policy-making process has implications for the role of (bio)ethical expertise it does not, in the final analysis, provide an account that is appropriate for this latter form of specialist expertise. Nevertheless, it is an informative perspective, and one that can help us make sense of the political uses of (bio)ethical expertise

Mapping Children's Discussions of Evidence in Science to Assess Collaboration and Argumentation

The research reported in this paper concerns the development of children's skills of interpreting and evaluating evidence in science. Previous studies have shown that school teaching often places limited emphasis on the development of these skills, which are necessary for children to engage in scientific debate and decision-making. The research, undertaken in the UK, involved four collaborative decision-making activities to stimulate group discussion, each was carried out with five groups of four children (10-11 years old). The research shows how the children evaluated evidence for possible choices and judged whether their evidence was sufficient to support a particular conclusion or the rejection of alternative conclusions. A mapping technique was developed to analyse the discussions and identify different "levels" of argumentation. The authors conclude that suitable collaborative activities that focus on the discussion of evidence can be developed to exercise children's ability to argue effectively in making decisions

Argumentation in school science : Breaking the tradition of authoritative exposition through a pedagogy that promotes discussion and reasoning

The value of argumentation in science education has become internationally recognised and has been the subject of many research studies in recent years. Successful introduction of argumentation activities in learning contexts involves extending teaching goals beyond the understanding of facts and concepts, to include an emphasis on cognitive and metacognitive processes, epistemic criteria and reasoning. The authors focus on the difficulties inherent in shifting a tradition of teaching from one dominated by authoritative exposition to one that is more dialogic, involving small-group discussion based on tasks that stimulate argumentation. The paper builds on previous research on enhancing the quality of argument in school science, to focus on how argumentation activities have been designed, with appropriate strategies, resources and modelling, for pedagogical purposes. The paper analyses design frameworks, their contexts and lesson plans, to evaluate their potential for enhancing reasoning through foregrounding the processes of argumentation. Examples of classroom dialogue where teachers adopt the frameworks/plans are analysed to show how argumentation processes are scaffolded. The analysis shows that several layers of interpretation are needed and these layers need to be aligned for successful implementation. The analysis serves to highlight the potential and limitations of the design frameworks

Inference from controversial arguments

International audienceWe present new careful semantics within Dung's theory of argumentation. Under such careful semantics, two arguments cannot belong to the same extension whenever one of them indirectly attacks a third argument while the other one indirectly defends the third.We argue that our semantics lead to a better handling of controversial arguments than Dung's ones in some settings. We compare the careful inference relations induced by our semantics w.r.t. cautiousness; we also compare them with the inference relations induced by Dung's semantic

Argument mining: A machine learning perspective

Argument mining has recently become a hot topic, attracting the interests of several and diverse research communities, ranging from artificial intelligence, to computational linguistics, natural language processing, social and philosophical sciences. In this paper, we attempt to describe the problems and challenges of argument mining from a machine learning angle. In particular, we advocate that machine learning techniques so far have been under-exploited, and that a more proper standardization of the problem, also with regards to the underlying argument model, could provide a crucial element to develop better systems