Defending the Public Good With Texts: Urban Middle School Students’ Classroom Debates About Ancient Civilizations

• In Event: Innovations in Teaching History: Promoting Historical Learning, Historical Understanding, and the Common Core Standards

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how urban middle school students participate in classroom debates about ancient civilizations, which is a particularly challenging task given the actions of people in ancient times and young students’ tendency to judge historical actors “according to contemporary values” (Reisman & Wineburg, 2012, p. 176). Though previous studies on classroom debates in middle and high school describe the successes and challenges students face (MacArthur, Ferretti, & Okolo, 2002; Walker & Zeidler, 2007), these studies do not go into great detail about students’ competence in debates. This study attempts to identify more of the strengths students demonstrate, as they are learning to debate, with the hope that these capabilities can be leveraged to improve instruction in argumentation and history.
My framework for studying classroom debates on historical topics is influenced by Berland and Reiser’s (2009) “three goals of constructing and defending scientific explanations” (p. 29). In these goals, they emphasize the importance of: 1) students explaining the connection between scientific evidence and claims, and 2) students persuading others that their explanation is the right one. I view the historical counterparts of these elements as essential to successful participation in classroom debates on topics in history. In this study, I take a closer look at student explanations of how a piece of historical evidence supports a position in a debate and students’ acts of persuasion.
I analyzed the transcripts of six audio-recorded classroom debates from two classes of 7th grade students and four classes of 6th grade students from four racially and ethnically diverse schools located in a large urban area. The audio-recordings were drawn from the Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate (CCDD) research project, an IES-funded cluster randomized trial investigating the impact of classroom discussion/debate on middle school students’ reading comprehension.
The qualitative research analysis software called Dedoose was used to code the transcripts. Codes for argumentative moves were obtained/modified from extant research (Clark & Sampson, 2008), while codes for quality of text-based historical grounds were generated using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). Thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998) was used to identify themes in students’ attempts to persuade others.
Preliminary results show that: 1) students’ most frequently used argumentative move was opposition (56.4%), 2) students used textual evidence with and without reasoning to support their arguments over a third of the time (37.6%) and they used text-based inferences/references as grounds nearly as much (36. 8%), and 3) students often attempted to persuade their classmates by appealing to their sense of the “public good.” In other words, students often tried to convince their classmates that their side benefited the most people.
The results of this study suggest that despite its many challenges, urban middle school students demonstrate a number of strengths during historical classroom debate including offering counterarguments (which the literature shows is difficult for young students, particularly in history), supporting their arguments with rich textual evidence and reasoning, and drawing on their classmates’ concern for the well-being of others to be persuasive.

Author

• Leslie Duhaylongsod, Harvard University