Exploring the Use of Argumentation Classroom Situations to Enhance Teachers' Noticing-of-Argumentation

• In Event: What Constitutes Teacher Noticing of Critical Events?

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives
The importance of argumentation in the mathematics classroom is well recognized (Staples & Newton, 2016). Still, research demonstrates that teachers have difficulties integrating argumentation into classroom practice (Author & Colleague, 2016) and that argumentation is uncommon (Umland & Sriraman, 2020). It therefore appears crucial to devise professional learning for enhancing argumentation. We address this issue by building on existing teacher-noticing research and exploring a particular type of noticing: noticing-of-argumentation. We investigate the development of teachers' skills of noticing-of-argumentation using critical events during their participation in a university course. We call this type of critical events: argumentation classroom situations (ACSs). Here, we focus on teachers’ attention to structural and dialogic aspects of argumentation when analyzing an ACS.
We conceptualize argumentation as learners’ collaborations on constructing arguments, listening to others’ ideas critically but respectively, and striving to reach a consensus (Asterhan & Schwarz, 2016). Argumentation has two important aspects: structural, focusing on the claims and justifications, in accordance with the accepted types of justification in the classroom community, and dialogic, relating to co-constructing of arguments, critiquing peer-arguments, mutual respect, and working toward consensus-building (McNeill & Pimentel, 2010). Following Jacobs et al. (2010), we conceptualize the noticing-of-argumentation as a set of three skills: attending to structural and dialogic aspects of argumentation in the classroom situation, interpreting the argumentation, and responding. Here, we focus on attention.
Methods
An ACS is a written representation of a classroom instructional situation, which provides opportunities to attend to structural and dialogical aspects of argumentation and to offer interpretations by addressing factors that seem to shape the argumentation. Sixty-one secondary teachers were asked at the course’s beginning to analyze an ACS focusing on “abbreviated multiplication formulas” in a 9th grade class, using a report format that requested providing a detailed description of how structural and dialogic aspects are manifested in the ACS, bringing examples, and noting the specific line-numbers. We used a rubric to analyze the ACS-reports, by applying quality-levels focusing on what and how the structural and dialogic aspects of argumentation were attended.
Results and Significance
The results indicate that regarding structural aspects, about two-thirds of the teachers identified correctly all claims and justifications in the ACS; the rest did so partially. Regarding dialogic aspects, about two-thirds of the teachers attended to co-constructing arguments and provided detailed descriptions of how this aspect is manifested in the ACS. Regarding critiquing, mutual respect, and working towards consensus-building, about 50%, 40%, and 40% of the teachers, respectively attended to and provided detailed description of how the aspect is manifested in the ACS. The rest did not attend to the aspect or did it superficially.
Nowadays our research examines possible explanations for the findings and potential methods for cultivating the teachers' noticing-of-argumentation. We believe that the artifacts designed in this study (ACS, ACS-report format, ACS-rubric) would serve researchers and teacher educators as a basis for further refinement, for promoting teachers’ noticing-of-argumentation in the mathematical classroom.

Authors

• Michal Ayalon Rahimi, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Samaher Naama, University of Haifa
  Non-Presenting Author