The ability to evaluate and construct arguments underlies almost all intellectual endeavors and academic subjects. Psychologists suggest the ability to argue plays an important role in making decisions, solving problems, devising experiments, analyzing data, negotiating, persuading, collaborating, and writing.

Starting from the premise that learning to argue well and to evaluate the arguments of others should be central goals of education, this research investigates argumentation as a method for teaching and learning. Despite its importance, there is relatively sparse research on teaching and learning argumentation, and on how it can support learning across curricula.

The ability to evaluate and construct arguments underlies almost all intellectual endeavors and academic subjects. Psychologists suggest the ability to argue plays an important role in making decisions, solving problems, devising experiments, analyzing data, negotiating, persuading, collaborating, and writing.

Starting from the premise that learning to argue well and to evaluate the arguments of others should be central goals of education, this research investigates argumentation as a method for teaching and learning. Despite its importance, there is relatively sparse research on teaching and learning argumentation, and on how it can support learning across curricula.

The ability to argue requires articulating a claim, giving reasons or evidence that support it, and, in skilled arguers, identifying and refuting counterarguments.

Educational research on argumentation is needed to address three key questions:

• What, if any, are the instructional benefits of argumentation?
• What elements of argumentation are critical in attaining those benefits?
• What instructional methods advance students’ ability to argue and analyse arguments?

Constructing arguments is theorized to require processing information in more depth than many other learning activities. Supporting this view, the few existing studies on the instructional effects of argumentation have found that it can facilitate problem solving as well as foster greater understanding of course content in mathematics, physics, biology and geography. Other evidence indicates that argumentation can increase students’ interest and intrinsic motivation toward course content because it involves them in evaluating competing claims.

Weighed against the instructional benefits of argumentation are the difficulties students have in doing it. Researchers have found that many students are unable to recognize and distinguish claims, explanations, and evidence. There is evidence that even post-secondary students have difficulty presenting reasoned arguments in discussions and compositions, and rarely present counterarguments.

The research proposed here will investigate the related hypotheses that:

• (a) interactive, student-controlled concept maps (Nesbit & Adesope, 2006), structured note formats, and other cognitive tools implemented as educational software can effectively support teaching and learning argumentation; and
• (b) using these tools in learning to argue in a knowledge domain can foster deep knowledge and conceptual change in that domain.

These hypotheses are informed by research in self-regulated learning, which indicates that students’ goal-setting and self-evaluating are key processes enabling them to successfully determine what and how to learn.

The research will use cognitive tools available in an educational computer program, gStudy, completed over the last three years by a team of Canadian researchers. gStudy was designed to advance research in self-regulated learning by providing students with concept mapping, note-making and information labelling tools. Students participating in our research will use gStudy to evaluate arguments presented in instructional multimedia documents, and to construct arguments from information in those documents.

To evaluate theories of how argumentation affects learning, the research will collect detailed data from students’ actions as they work with gStudy, including records of eye movements. Eye movement data is critical to show how students search diagrams, "argument maps," and other information sources as they assess and construct arguments.

As an example of a planned study, one group of students will be asked to construct an argument and another asked to prepare a summary. Records of behaviour and eye movements will show how the goal instruction (argue or summarize) affects the ways students interact with the provided information. If arguing does stimulate deeper learning, such data will help to explain why, and will inform a theory of the instructional effects of argumentation.