This study examined the effects of students' argumentation standpoints on their argumentation learning in the context of socio-scientific issues (SSIs). To that end, four kinds of argumentation standpoints were defined: affirmative standpoints, oppositional standpoints, multiple standpoints, and non-standpoints. These four kinds of standpoints…

The political scene in Tunisia has drastically changed since the 2011 revolution. It has paved the way for free expression to become an essential component applicable to everyday life. It was thus fundamental to introduce competitive debating as a tool necessary to mediate and organize free speech inside educational practices. Although debating is…

Introduction: The aim of this study was to analyze how oral argumentative strategies, argumentative sequences and interaction patterns relate to argumentative content and the required learning objectives. Method: Two different kinds of debates were analyzed. In the first, the participants defended one point of view, while in the second the…

This article reports from an empirical study on the affordances and constraints for using staged socio-political debates for authentic summative assessment of scientific literacy. The article focuses on conditions for student participation and what purposes emerge in student interaction in a socio-political debate. As part of the research project,…

Argumentation is a key requirement of the essay, which is the most common genre that students have to write. However, how argumentation is realised in disciplinary writing is often poorly understood by academic tutors, and therefore not adequately taught to students. This paper presents research into undergraduate students' concepts of argument…

The students in three sections of a class rated their knowledge and identified their view before and after each of five in-class debates. The degree of self-reported knowledge was significantly different after four of the five debates. Between 31% and 58% of participants changed their views after participating in or observing each debate. Some…

Arguing that any discussion of debate theory is incomplete without at least some analysis or review of paradigm theory, this paper begins by analogizing the arguments over paradigms to a battle ground over control of the activity. The analysis then shifts to an examination of Thomas Kuhn's sociological theory as a basis for the argument that the…

This paper examines the overall effect of the 1976 presidential debates on the public's learning about issues and candidates, identifying several factors that are linked to campaign learning and that explain individual differences in the amount of learning that occurred from watching the debates. Findings presented in this paper are based on an…