Poster #86 - Social Perspective-Taking in Argumentative Writing: Developmental and Demographic Differences

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

The current rise in authoritarian sympathies across the globe raises a number of questions for developmentalists and educators—about how to encourage democratic ideals among young people, and about what kind of critical thought we can hope to see as they grow up, among many others. A high degree of international mobility, and the great diversity of viewpoints that come into contact as a result, suggest an increasing need to foster the development of social perspective-taking (SPT) skill: skills in dealing with the standpoints that others occupy in light of their experiences and beliefs.

The present study places pre-adolescent and adolescent students in a position to judge a question that is both contentious and deeply relevant to them: whether technology access should be curtailed in the aftermath of a cyberbullying incident. It asks them to craft a letter to their principal, despite the power imbalance between her and the students, that would advise specific courses of action following that hypothetical incident. The goal of the analysis is to explore the development of SPT in students’ persuasive writing, as one tool of many that can serve to help arguments persuade, rather than simply embodying rubrics and formulas.

We collected 816 essays written by students grades 4-7 in a single school district in the northeastern US in the final year of the experimental trial of a debate-based curriculum in order to code them for SPT features: acknowledgment, noting the actors in a given social situation; articulation, describing the thoughts, feelings, or orientations to action of those actors; and positioning, identifying the roles, circumstances, or attributes that shape those actors’ stances. The essays were manually and reliably blind-coded by two researchers. In addition to coding SPT, we gathered demographic data on English language-learner (ELL) status, free/reduced-price lunch eligibility, and race/ethnicity, as well as scores from students’ completion of the ASPP (a validated measure of SPT acts: Kim et al., 2018), the MCAS ELA (the Massachusetts state standardized test), and the GISA (a validated measure of deep reading comprehension: O'Reilly et al., 2014).

The data were analyzed using hierarchical mixed models, nesting students within classrooms. Significant variation in essay lengths led us to control for number of words per essay. We analyzed the three levels of SPT separately, first in light only of demographic variables, and then incorporating separately the validated assessments tracking relevant skills. The outcome measure in each model was the number of tokens of the respective SPT acts per essay. The three levels of SPT skill were differently related to demographic features and to deep reading comprehension, although, interestingly, no significant relationships emerged between scores on the ASPP and any of the essay measures. Younger students articulated more perspectives than older students, perhaps due to greater focus on traditional argument features in the older grades.

These findings will be supplemented with qualitative essay data and discussed in light of the demographic and developmental features they reflect, as well as implications for instruction in argumentative writing.

Author

• Lisa Hsin, Harvard University
  Presenting Author