Since the late 1990s, there has been consensus among educational researchers that argumentation should play a central role in science education. Although there has been extensive relevant research, it is not clear enough how oral argumentation spontaneously occurs in science teaching. This is particularly important with regard to the empirical…

This study systematically analyzed social and cognitive processes that underlie the development of argumentative knowledge. Group discussions of controversial issues and explicit instruction in argumentation were expected to help students acquire a sense of the overall structure of an argument, or an argument schema. In a quasi-experiment, 128…