Argumentation for Conceptual Change and the Role of Text Type

• In Event: The Role of Texts in Dialogic Teaching

Abstract

Research on argumentation in educational settings is multi-faceted and has focused on a number of different goals for argumentation. In the present contribution, we zoom in on argumentation as a means to gain a better and deeper understanding of domain-specific subject matter. Even more specifically, we focus on learning that requires the transformation of misconceived knowledge about natural phenomena towards the scientifically accepted, canonical account (conceptual change).
Through a series of experimental, correlational and qualitative studies (e.g., Asterhan, 2018; Asterhan & Babichenko, 2015; Asterhan & Schwarz, 2009), we have attempted to characterize the type of argumentive dialogue that advances conceptual change. Three (quantifiable) key features have emerged from this research:
(1) critique and challenges;
(2) supportive and collaborative interpersonal regulation;
(3) a content-specific focus on pivotal conceptual issues that lie at the basis of a misconceived notion.
In spite of its potential for conceptual change, however, this type of peer argumentation is not easily established and requires intensive support. In the current presentation, we report on efforts to support the third feature, which has considerably less attention in the literature than the first two. Inspections of dialogue protocols reveal that while students can participate in critical, collaborative argumentation when supported, they rarely do so on the pivotal issues that underlie their misconceptions, thus forfeiting important opportunities for conceptual change through peer argumentation. Most importantly, they rarely manage to notice how two proposed solutions during the discussion are based on conceptually very distinctive models, or how a naïve understanding is different from the scientifically correct account without further support (e.g., Sfard, 2009).
Strikingly, the reading materials that learners are standardly given in these tasks are of the expository type, in which the correct scientific account is explained in great detail, yet not directly juxtaposed with common misconceptions. We explore whether replacing them with refutation texts could alleviate some of this difficulty. In refutation texts, the misconceptions are explicitly stated, refuted and followed by the full scientific explanation (e.g., Diakidoy, Kendeou & Ioannides, 2003; Kendeou & O’Brien, 2014; Sinatra & Broughton, 2011). By presenting and contrasting between the two side by side, students are expected to be more capable to draw on these resources, be more attentive to and focus their discussion better content-wise. In a first experiment with 100 undergraduates, we found that the refutation texts were very successful in achieving conceptual learning on the topic of natural selection, but that the following peer argumentations episode did not further augment these gains. Post hoc dialogue analyses did show that dyads who referred to pivotal conceptual aspects of natural selection gained more than those who did not. We posit that whereas the refutation text may have rendered the subsequent argumentive discussion redundant for adult undergraduates, this is not expected to be the case for middle school students.

Author

• Christa Asterhan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem