Traditional debates versus reflective discussions: Impact on argumentative strategies and perspective taking in secondary school students.
Submitted by:
Lidia Casado Ledesma
Abstract:
Debate activities are instructional strategies widely used by teachers (Parker & Hess, 2001). Although the benefits of these participatory methodologies have been demonstrated (Correa, Ceballos, Correa & Batista, 2003), there are still several doubts about the conditions under which these oral contexts of participation are truly effective.
Some studies have explored how different type of discussion impacts the quality of the argumentative essays that students produce after the oral interactions (García-Mila et al., 2013; Simonneaux, 2001). In this kind of research, refutation is commonly considered the highest level of argumentative competence. However, refutation strategies are often associated with one-sided reasoning (Nussbaum & Schraw, 2007).
The aim of the present work is to explore this issue further. For that, we analyzed the influence of two oral contexts of participation, differentiated by the goal of the discussion, on: a) the ability to take perspective in the students, and b) the quality of their argumentative texts. The quality of the texts was assessed considering the strategies that imply integration of arguments and counterarguments. Furthermore, we were interested in analyzing the strategies employed during the oral interactions and not only in the written products.
The first condition of the study (persuasion) was articulated as a traditional debate in which students had to defend the assigned side in the controversy. The second condition (consensus) required students to reflect on the discussion and to reach a conclusion that integrated both sides of the controversy. The discussions were based on texts that presented opposing views about controversial issues in science. In addition, we varied the grade of participation of the students in these argumentative activities: students could act as mere observers of the discussion or as representatives of one of the positions in the discussion session.
Ninety four secondary school students, from two different high schools, participated in the study. A quasi-experimental design with pre and post measurement was used, with condition (persuasion vs. consensus) and grade of participation (observers v. representatives) as inter-subject variables. All students wrote two argumentative synthesis from texts presenting opposing views (pretest –before oral argumentation activities- and posttest -after oral argumentation activities-). Students also answered a questionnaire about taking perspectives, in pre and posttest tasks. To analyze the discursive strategies, some of the discussions were recorded and transcribed.
Our results showed that these activities were effective in improving perspective taking and integration of arguments and counterarguments, as shown in the written synthesis. However, on a secondary analysis we found that only the students with a high level of linguistic competence obtained benefits from these activities. There were no differences between the two conditions (persuasion vs. consensus), and neither we find a differential impact of the activities depending on the kind of participation (observers v. representatives). In spite of this absence of effects in the written synthesis, we did find that the integration of arguments and counterarguments was underrepresented during the oral interactions when the discussion was articulated as a traditional debate.
References
Correa, N., Ceballos, E., Correa, A.D., & Batista, L. (2003). Efectos evolutivos y contextuales en la adopción de perspectivas y en la argumentación escrita. Cultura y Educación, 15 (4), 343-356.
García-Mila, M., Gilabert, S., Erduran, S. & Felton, M. (2013). The effect of argumentative task goal on the quality of argumentative discourse. Science Education, 97,497–523.
Nussbaum, E.M. & Schraw, G. (2007). Promoting argument–counterargument integration in students’ writing. Journal of Experimental Education, 76, 59–92.
Parker, W.C. & Hess, D. (2001). Teaching with and for discussion. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17, 273-289.
Simonneaux, L. (2001). Role-play or debate to promote students’ argumentation and justification on as issue in animal transgenesis. International Journal of Science Education, 23, 903–927.