Thousands of students and hundreds of institutions participate in intercollegiate forensics competitions each year. Previous research has discovered instances of plagiarism by competitors on multiple occasions, despite this being against the rules of competition and a violation of academic norms. The purpose of this pragmatic qualitative research…

The present study examined the influence of the technological environment and the technological mediation on argumentative interactions among university students. Eighty-two students, paired in dyads, participated in discussions on an academic task in different settings (face-to-face, chat, video call), and with or without technological mediation…

This study investigated students' critical reasoning about commercials, as an aspect of advertising literacy. Critical reasoning was examined under two different experimental conditions. That is, students were tasked with watching four different commercials with 1) brand information provided or not, and 2) asked to engage in critical reasoning or…

This study adopted a pre-test--post-test design to explore gender differences in argumentative essay writing and peer review performance and uptake within a higher education context. To do this, as part of a bigger project, 101 students were asked to individually write an argumentative essay, engage in peer review activities and revise their…

Adopting the first five phases of Mezirow's transformative learning theory (Mezirow, 1978; 1990; 1994; 1997; 1998; 2009; 2018) as a framework, this study examined the impact of a Midwestern university civil discourse program on participants' transformative learning. The study sample included participants who attended the Talk Together program over…

Argumentation skills are important for students to analyze and evaluate critical information, especially in complex science issues. Socio-Scientific Real-world Inquiry [SSRI] learning helps students develop deep scientific understanding and the ability to build evidence-based arguments in a real context. This study aimed to examine the…

This paper argues that traditional threshold-based approaches to the analysis of pauses in writing fail to capture the complexity of the cognitive processes involved in text production. It proposes that, to capture these processes, pause analysis should focus on the transition times between linearly produced units of text. Following a review of…

The purpose of this study is to examine the performances of university students' using dynamic mathematics software GeoGebra in argumentations and proving processes. A task related to the limit involving "sinx/x" was designed and 18 university students worked on the task during the collaborative learning, scientific debate, and…

This full paper concerns an exploratory study that investigates students' reasoning about torsion. Mechanical reasoning is critical to engineering applications and yet students still struggle to accurately predict, analyze, and model mechanical systems using formal symbolic notations (i.e., formalizations). To understand the nature of students'…

Much of the literature exploring Chinese international student engagement with critical thinking in Western universities draws on reductive essentialisations of 'Confucianism' in efforts to explain cross-cultural differences. In this paper I review literature problematising these tendencies. I then shift focus from inferences about how philosophy…

Socio-scientific argumentation (SSA) is increasingly being recognized as a key aspect of scientific literacy. Much of the reason for this is that this skill is crucial for helping students to become active participants in twenty-first-century democratic societies in which the construction of informed and critical views of socio-scientific issues…

How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what "actually" happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined),…

This research aims to thoroughly explore how authentic assessment methods, designed to emulate real-life challenges, contribute to enhancing the abilities of students to construct logical arguments, critically evaluate evidence, and articulate thoughts coherently in writing. In order to achieve the stated objective, a qualitative research design…

In this study, an interactive science learning app on the topic of plate tectonics was developed for tablets to promote argumentative reasoning. The app guided learners through learning stages that required them to propose arguments, identify relevant evidence, acquire background knowledge, and engage in argumentative reasoning in different…

The ethnoscience-based reflective learning model has been implemented in the classroom while the learning process has its own strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of this study was to determine the interaction between learning models and arguments for creative thinking. A mixed methods research design was applied to collect both qualitative and…