The Role of Texts in the Argue With Me Curriculum

• In Event: The Role of Texts in Dialogic Teaching

Abstract

In the Argue With Me curriculum text is used as the primary outcome variable to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. Why do we use written essays as an outcome variable? Teachers are very concerned to support student writing, and we wish to demonstrate the bridge from discourse to individual argument, as reflected in an essay (Authors, 2016). In the present work, we examine whether the curriculum’s original purpose of developing argument skills can effectively incorporate the further purpose of enhancing students’ knowledge, often referred to as arguing to learn, vs. learning to argue (Asterhan & Schwarz, 2016), without compromising either goal.

Students often come to a topic without sufficient knowledge to make discussion productive. We propose that students must come into contact with new information about the topic in a way that makes it comprehensible to them (Murphy et al., 2018); integrate it into an existing knowledge base and then make use of this new knowledge in a functional way in discourse. In this study, we examined the effect of the form in which information is made available to students – in short questions and answers (Q&A) vs. a conventional text. Does information become of greater potential use if a question it answers has been posed? Will students better appreciate and be able to make use of this information if they recognize its potential argumentive purpose? In the present design, the form of the text made available to students is an independent variable and the text students construct is the dependent variable.

Methods
Middle-schoolers engaged in nine 90-min sessions involving e-dialogs and reflective activities. The topic was gas vs. solar energy. In the Q&A condition, before each dialog students were offered a choice of short questions with accompanying answers, with the suggestion that having an answer to this question might be useful in their argumentation. In a control (text) condition, the identical information was made available at the outset as a traditional informational text. The outcome variable was number and type of functional evidence-based idea units in final essays students wrote.

Results
In their post-intervention essays, the Q&A group outperformed the text group in more often making evidence-based statements, particularly in the more challenging function of weakening opposing claims, F(3, 172)=17.955, p < .001. The Q&A method was similarly superior in gains in factual knowledge on the topic.

Scientific Significance
The present study shows that it is possible to accomplish both knowledge and skill goals in a curriculum centered on argumentation. Furthermore, this is so even in cases in which pre-existing topic knowledge is negligible. Enough knowledge must be acquired, however, to make argumentation productive or even feasible, and the Q&A method appears an effective one to meet this objective.

Authors

• Kalypso Iordanou, University of Central Lancashire

• Deanna Kuhn, Columbia University