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Supporting the Development of Argumentative Skills

Anne Britt, Northern Illinois University (Click name for speaker's biography)
Friday, November 17, 2006
BSB 2019 1:00-2:30pm

Argumentation skill is important both with and outside school, however, many students leave high school unable to understand, evaluate and write arguments. We have recently found significant deficits in college students' comprehension, evaluation, and production of arguments. In terms of comprehension, college students were able to identify only 35% of the main claims and reasons in real texts and they fail to consistently recall the claim precisely (75% accuracy). College students also have difficulty evaluating arguments, such as rejecting unwarranted arguments only 68% accuracy. Finally, students had production difficulties, such as writing arguments with missing or imprecise claims, unelaborated or missing support, and omission of opposition.

We have traced the source of these deficits, in part, to the following factors: Imprecise representations, failure to test support relationships, and biased strategies for search and production. To help students further develop each of these skills, we have developed three web-based tutorials that provide instruction and practice.

In this presentation, we will describe each of the tutorials in detail, focusing on the principles behind the tutorials. Then we will present an experiment testing the effectiveness of each of these tutorials in partially ameliorating these skill deficits. Finally, we will discuss the limits of each tutorial and future directions to pursue.

Powerpoint Presentation (pdf format): UIC_06_talk2211.ppt

Audio File:
ss_britt_061117.mp3 53 MB

Quicktime Movie
(Right Click/Control Click & Save to download):
128 MB (90 Minutes)