Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) is a pedagogical practice that aims to enhance thinking skills through group dialogue. One way it achieves this goal is by providing exposure to arguments. In a philosophical group dialogue, participants encounter, examine, or construct arguments. These arguments not only emerge spontaneously during discussions…

In a sample of 323 engineering students, structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships between beliefs about the nature of knowledge in science, beliefs about the process of justification for knowing in science, and argumentative reasoning about an ill-structured social-scientific issue. Beliefs about justification for…

This paper aims to shed light on an overlooked but essential aspect of informal reasoning and its radical implication to mathematics education research: Decentralising mathematics. We start to problematise that previous studies on informal reasoning implicitly overfocus on what students infer. Based on Walton's distinction between reasoning and…

The most important understanding science students should acquire is arguably an understanding of science as a way of knowing, one central to science but not specific to it. Students' own engagement in scientific inquiry and argument can support this developing understanding but does not guarantee it. We report the results of urban adolescents'…

While previous research has shown that claim-evidence-reasoning can effectively promote higher-order thinking skills in science education, more research should be done on using claim evidence-reasoning in elementary school settings. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of claim-evidence-reasoning in promoting the scientific reasoning…

Argumentation-based classroom interventions are a growing alternative for stimulating conceptual learning, thinking, and communicative skills. However, not all classroom argumentation is desired, nor does every argumentation design lead students to develop their abilities and understanding. In the educational literature, productive argumentation…

Social interactions, including collaborative problem-solving situations, can trigger critical thinking skills. Giving questions that are not routine can trigger students' critical thinking skills in solving problems collaboratively. This research aims to develop non-routine mathematics problems that can be used to explore students' critical…

Critiquing arguments is important for K-12 science students to learn but not emphasized by the predominant claim-evidence-reasoning (CER) argumentation model. Drawing on the work of Yu and Zenker (2020), and Dove and Nussbaum (2018), we developed a tool for supplementing CER with critical questions (CQs) from philosophy that cover most, if not…

In recent years, there has been growing interest in exploring argumentation about socio-scientific issues (SSI) in the classroom to improve students' scientific literacy. Thus, this research aims to investigate how intervention based on argumentation about SSI affects secondary students' patterns of informal reasoning and reasoning quality. The…

Critical thinking is of paramount importance in our society. People regularly assume that critical thinking is a way to reduce conspiracy belief, although the relationship between critical thinking and conspiracy belief has never been tested. We conducted two studies (Study 1, N = 86; Study 2, N = 252), in which we found that critical thinking…

Critical thinking is one of the most desired skills in the workplace, as it assists an individual in solving complex problems and making informed decisions, resulting in their workplace success. Argumentation is one instructional approach that provides students an opportunity to engage in higher-order thinking and improve their communication…

A key purpose of higher education seminars is to support higher-order thinking, yet empirical evidence of how this is evidenced and scaffolded in higher education remains scarce. Building on previous work on identifying rhetorical and linguistic devices for argumentation, we found that higher-order thinking can be evidenced through using…

Expert mathematicians use examples and visual representations as part of their informal mathematics reasoning when constructing proofs. In contrast, the ways undergraduates reason and work toward creating proofs is an open area of investigation, particularly in advanced mathematics. Furthermore, research on students' reasoning in topology is…

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'…

Mathematical reasoning has been a critical concern in Turkey especially since the structure of the student selection examination for high schools changed six years ago. The ability to solve the questions in the new exam requires high level reasoning and argumentation skills. Schools, whether they are public or private, prepare 8th graders for this…