This paper explicates how statutes and case law (court cases) can be used as sources for discourse analysis when researching South African education reform through a complexity theory lens. Firstly, the law-making process is built on discourses at different levels. Secondly, discourses are manifested in case law because in order to resolve…

Given the role of scientific argumentation in science education (Osborne, 2010), argumentative discourse styles provide a means to understand the various dialogue types with distinct rhetorical features that individuals adopt during argumentative activities. Previous research indicates that different argumentative discourse styles lead to varied…

In collaborative problem solving, children produce and evaluate arguments for proposals. We investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 192) can produce and evaluate arguments against those arguments (i.e., counter-arguments). In Study 1, each child within a peer dyad was privately given a reason to prefer one over another solution to a task. One…

The prospect of enhancing ourselves through the use of new biotechnologies is for the most part, hypothetical. Nevertheless, the question of whether we should undertake such enhancement is worthy of discussion as it may become possible in the future. In this article, we consider one form of argument that conservative opponents of biotechnological…

Writing and argumentation are critical to both professional physics and physics education. They are both necessary to the practices of professional science like paper writing and peer review, and are increasingly emphasized in science education standards and best practices. Despite this, the skill of making an extended argument in writing is often…

In this era of extreme political polarization, it's tempting to believe nothing can be done to heal a nation that is so obviously divided and led by dysfunctional politicians. But there is a relatively simple and powerful way to begin the healing, and at the same time prepare the next generations of leaders for the rigorous demands of a constantly…

In order to effectively grade persuasive writing we must be able to reliably identify and extract extract argument structures. In order to do this we must classify arguments by their structural roles (e.g., major claim, claim, and premise). Current approaches to classification typically rely on statistical models with heavy feature-engineering or…

This article describes the research design and findings from a use-inspired study of online text-based mathematics resources. We sought to understand whether and how existing mathematics interest, together with the learner characteristics of prior coursework in mathematics and proof scheme, influenced comprehension of mathematical argumentation…

This study investigated the contribution of vocabulary size and depth to second language (L2) writing performance. For this purpose, 53 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) postgraduate students took the Vocabulary Levels Test (VST) and the New Vocabulary Levels Test (NVLT), to measure vocabulary size, and the Word Associates Test (WAT) and the…

Students' argumentation performance can be influenced by their epistemic beliefs, however, in the context of argumentative essay writing and argumentative peer feedback in online setting this has not been clearly investigated. This study explores relationship between students' epistemic beliefs and argumentation performance regarding essay writing…

This study investigates the effects of teacher-focused feedback (TF) and automatic writing evaluation (AWE) on global writing performance as well as syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical diversity, and fluency (CALF) of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' narrative and argumentative writings. The participants were randomly assigned to…

Research on academic stance and evaluation has been prolific over the past few decades. Few studies, however, have focused on exploring the evaluative potential of that-constructions in shaping the structure of academic arguments. To address this lacuna, the current study aimed at exploring the potential impact of the distinct communicative…

Persuasion is inherent to the instructional process. Instructions delivered through online programs do not always generate expected and consistent learning outcomes, and hence persuasion in online instructional design is even more critical. Through this mixed-method study, we aim to identify the most widely used persuasive design techniques, the…

The aim of this study is to analyze spoken linguistic features of three-minute startup pitches. Linguistic features analyzed included discourse markers, dysfluency, modality, numeral phrases, pronouns, reduced forms, repetitions, rhetorical questions, vague expressions, and vocatives. The corpus is comprised of 92 startup pitches delivered in real…

The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for analyzing classroom argumentation that includes a process of rebutting. A most commonly used framework to analyze argument in science education is Toulmin's Argumentation Pattern. It is useful for analyzing argumentation but it cannot represent the complexity of students' rebuttals during…