Law students should be able to fathom the application of legal rules to specific cases and develop a consistent argumentation to support this interpretation by using logic. Different skills and competencies are required for each of these processes. Therefore, effective learning of Law must complement the necessary knowledge of Positive Law with a…

This essay explores ways television commercials can teach both media literacy skills and social studies content knowledge. Because of their brevity and concise messages, commercials offer teachers a wide assortment of engaging, content focused lesson topics that can be used to introduce new ideas, as writing or discussion prompts to further…

Current debates on e-cigarette policy in the UK are highly acrimonious and are framed in terms of evidence-based policymaking. Aims and objectives: The article aims to understand the use of evidence in policymaking in the context of both political controversy and limited policy-relevant evidence via a case study of UK e-cigarette debates. Methods:…

At the college level, it can be difficult to engage students outside the classroom through the use of effective homework assignments. Although it is straightforward to create assignments that test the ability to carry out computations as discussed in class, it is more challenging to create assignments that encourage students to think more…

This paper, taking linguistic theory of adaptation as its theoretical foundation, examines how courtroom questioning on the part of the judge is adapted to various contextual factors in legal setting. To account for the judge's adaptation to the legal procedures in courtroom questioning, three types of questions are found as specific choices at…

Forensics, or competitive speech and debate, has a history stretching back to the ancient Greeks. Although practitioners, students, and coaches have long sung its praises, limited research has been done to demonstrate the long-term value of forensics competition for students. This study used narrative interviews to discover the perceived value of…

While the early years of children's education have long been acknowledged as crucial in supporting learning and development, there has been less focus on argumentation literacy as a way to promote active learning. This conceptual paper explores a new cross-disciplinary teaching framework, called the kaleidoscope framework of inquiry dialogue,…

Constructing scientific arguments is an important practice for students because it helps them to make sense of data using scientific knowledge and within the conceptual and experimental boundaries of an investigation. In this study, we used a text mining method called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify underlying patterns in students…

In this article, the authors explain how to use the "evidence on the U" strategy to support deep and complex thinking in elementary students, and give examples of scaffolding activities that gradually place much of the responsibility for learning on the students themselves over the course of a year. They also describe how this teaching…

Online group debates hosted in asynchronous threaded discussions can facilitate critical thinking between discussants (and increase deeper understanding of complex problems) by eliminating the need for turn-taking while formulating and presenting premises to support and challenge claims. Yet to be determined is to what extent does the current…

Despite the last 40 years of research showing that computer-aided diagramming tools improve student learning, very little research reveals the cognitive processes that explain why and how diagramming tools and specific features of the tools affect learning. This study developed a tool that graduate students used to diagram and analyze arguments as…

The aim of this research was to establish the effects of argumentation and the quality of arguments related to history of the development of organic chemistry: (i) on the level of the pupils' knowledge about the composition, structure and general properties of organic compounds; and (ii) on their perception of the key aspect of NOS that scientific…

In order to design effective instruction and feedback for synthesis writing on both writing processes and products, a clear insight into synthesis writing processes underlying a high-quality synthesis text is crucial. That is why this study, as one of the first, examines the use of sources during synthesis writing processes, and its effect on text…

Few studies have investigated epistemic positioning in online postgraduate courses. Such courses in US contexts rely heavily on asynchronous online discussion forums. This study investigates how postgraduate students' patterned use of personal experience tellings functioned in the construction of their epistemic positioning (as 'expert' or…

Writing achievement is a complex skill set as characterized by the sociocognitive writing framework, including writing domain knowledge (e.g., sentence structure), general cognitive skills (e.g., critical thinking) and intra- (e.g., interest) and interpersonal (e.g., collaboration) subfactors. During students' postsecondary careers, they need to…