Promoting the Intellectual Skills of Argumentation in Urban Middle Schools: Case Studies of Teachers and Students Using a Debate-Based Social Studies Curriculum

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Today’s students need to learn higher-level intellectual skills, such as argumentation, in order to be competitive in future economies (National Research Council, 2008). This need is even greater in low-income, urban areas where skills that require critical thinking are often overshadowed by basic skills (Crowell & Kuhn, 2014). The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), designed to “ensure that all students have the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life…regardless of where they live” (CCSS Initiative, 2010, para. 2), emphasize argumentation as early as middle school. But as seen in the state of New York, many teachers feel they are not prepared to teach these intellectual skills (Baker, 2014). The education literature that can inform new and effective professional development programs is limited in this area. This is especially true for teaching argumentation skills. In a review of the research, Newell, Beach, Smith, and VanDerHeide (2011) noted a woeful lack of studies investigating “the teacher’s use of specific instructional methods in promoting the development of students’ argumentative reading and writing over time” (p. 297). Using classroom transcripts of teachers enacting Social Studies Generation (SoGen), a debate-based curriculum that is part of the interdisciplinary Word Generation program, I conducted three case studies to help fill this gap and inform teachers’ practice as they attempt to help students meet the more rigorous argumentation standards of the Common Core.

In the first study, I focused on what teachers do to support students’ dialogic argumentation skills, including generating and articulating counterarguments and rebuttals to arguments others have verbalized. Crowell and Kuhn (2014) found that a 3-year curriculum intervention, in which students engaged in “sustained and dense dialogic argumentation” (p. 377) via electronically conducted dialogues, had a significant and positive impact on students’ rates of counterargumentation. This intervention, however, is difficult to take to scale partially because of the technology required for the dialogues. Thus, there is a need for scalable curricula and teaching practices that promote dialogic argumentation without computer support. In this study, I investigated what three teachers, implementing the same lesson in SoGen, do to sustain argumentation in dialogues that are face to face. A preliminary analysis of the data shows that teachers promote dialogic argumentation by allowing two students to go back and forth, allowing students to talk out of turn, and doing a series of moves: reminding students what their opponents just said, prompting them to respond specifically to what was said, asking for a counterargument, and giving students time to come up with a counterargument.

In the second study, I explored how teachers, who are implementing SoGen for the first time, approach the task of supporting middle school students’ reasoning in text-based argumentation. By reasoning, I mean a justification as to how evidence supports a claim (McNeill & Krajcik, 2007). I examined two instructional conversations that took place concurrently in one classroom, each was facilitated by one of two co-teachers. I found that the teachers supported students’ reasoning in a variety of ways. Both teachers often read aloud verbatim the specific pieces of evidence from the text before asking students to explain how the evidence was connected to the claim. One teacher gave students time to think and write down their reasoning before sharing it with the group. The other teacher asked content questions about the reasoning and gave some substantive feedback. However, I also found instances where both teachers missed opportunities to help students further their reasoning. Instead of working with students struggling with their reasoning, they moved the conversation to a new task or topic. And one teacher did some “overhelping” with students’ reasoning. If students did not come up with reasoning that he found satisfactory, he would suggest his own reasoning and walk them through it, rather than work from their ideas.

In the third and final study, I focused on how students argue in the context of debates during enactments of the SoGen curriculum. My findings show that: 1) students used textual evidence and text-based reasoning in classroom debate at a much higher rate than what might be expected given previous studies on older students, and 2) students used productive social strategies to persuade others during debate, including repeating others before rebutting them and attempting to clarify and distinguish their own views from the views of others. The findings are in contrast to the current research on K-12 classroom debate, which highlights students’ weaknesses when participating in debates.

Author

• Leslie Duhaylongsod, Harvard University