Work

Improving Students' Evaluation of Informal Arguments

Year: 2009

Type: article

Abstract: Evaluating the structural quality of arguments is a skill important to students' ability to comprehend the arguments of others and produce their own. The authors examined college and high school students' ability to evaluate the quality of 2-clause (claim-reason) arguments and tested a tutorial to improve this ability. These experiments indicated that college and high school students had difficulty evaluating arguments on the basis of their quality. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a tutorial explaining skills important to overall argument evaluation increased performance but that immediate feedback during training was necessary for teaching students to evaluate the claim-reason connection. Using a Web-based version of the tutorial, Experiment 3 extended this finding to the performance of high-school students. The study suggests that teaching the structure of an argument and teaching students to pay attention to the precise message of the claim can improve argument evaluation.

Source: The Journal of Experimental Education

DOI: 10.3200/jexe.77.4.339-366

Authors: Aaron A. Larson, M. Anne Britt, Christopher A. Kurby

Institutions: Northern Illinois University, University of Memphis

Language: English

Topic: Educational Strategies and Epistemologies

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green

Funders: Northern Illinois University, University of Washington, Institute of Education Sciences, National Institute on Aging