The Impact of Structured Discussion on Students' Attitudes and Dispositions toward Argumentation

Argumentation skills are highly valued in both education and business. As a process, participating in argumentation helps a person to develop their meta-cognitive and higher-order thinking abilities. This paper reports on empirical results on middle-school students’ changes in attitudes towards argumentation as part of an ongoing design-based research study. Past attempts by researchers to foster students’ argumentation skills have met with mixed results. General Web-based discussion boards often do not provide the structures and process scaffolds to help students acquire the target skill. In this study, a web-based structured argumentation board with sentence openers as scaffolds was designed to support students’ engagement with argumentation over a four week long intervention. Two questionnaires, a pre-post and a post-then-pre, were designed to measure students’ attitudes towards argumentation. The two questionnaires were used to identify any treatment dependent “response-shift bias”. Statistical results showed an improvement in students’ attitudes toward argumentation. Qualitative analysis of student essays was also carried out and will be reported separately.