Supporting Students’ Argumentative Reasoning in the Social Studies Classroom

• In Event: 61.086 - Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 61.086-9 - Understanding and Promoting Student Reasoning Across the Content Areas

Abstract

The Common Core Writing Standards for Grade 7 state that students should 1) “write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence,” and 2) “use words, phrases, and clauses to...clarify the relationship among claim(s), reasons, and evidence” (Common Core State Standards, 2010). McNeill and Krajcik (2007) assign the term “reasoning” to this act of clarifying the relationship, or explaining the connection, between claims and evidence. There is a gap in the literature on how teachers actually teach the elements of argumentation, including this type of reasoning (Newell, Beach, Smith, & VanDerHeide, 2011). The purpose of this study is to investigate the ways in which teachers support students in verbally articulating their reasoning in the social studies classroom.
The data for this study consists of transcripts from one digitally-recorded 50-minute session of a 7th grade social studies classroom (in an urban school) being co-taught by two teachers. In this session, students were preparing for a classroom debate. I focused my analysis on segments in which each of the teachers led one of two student groups. They were helping students prepare for the debate by getting them to choose evidence and generate reasoning to support their team’s position. I used the qualitative research analysis software Dedoose to create a preliminary codebook from the transcripts. Codes were generated using grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006).
Preliminary findings show that both teachers supported student reasoning in these instructional conversations by asking how a specific piece of evidence in the text supported a specific claim. The teachers would go so far as to read aloud the piece of evidence verbatim in the text and repeat the claim in their question. Both teachers also asked questions about the claim/evidence connections their students articulated, but their questions were different. Teacher 1’s questions were focused on making sure she understood what the student was saying. Teacher 2’s questions dug more into the content of the claim/evidence connection, resulting in more “back and forth” between the student and teacher.
Teacher 1 also supported students by asking them to write out their claim/evidence connections before sharing them with the class. She also gave each student in the group an opportunity to share his/her connection. However, the feedback she gave to each student was non-specific (i.e. “Good!” “Great!”). Thus, there was no opportunity for students to improve the connections they made.
Teacher 2 did offer more specific feedback on students’ claim/evidence connection and his group had the opportunity to revise/improve their connections. However, fewer students had the opportunity to participate, since they went into more depth on fewer connections. Also, the teacher often ended up providing students with a connection of his own if students did not generate a satisfactory connection.
These findings suggest that teachers can support student reasoning by simplifying evidence and consistently reminding students of the claims they are trying to defend. And, with some patience on the teacher’s part and a willingness to offer meaningful feedback on the fly, students can further improve their reasoning.

Author

• Leslie Duhaylongsod, Harvard University