Chapter 2Cognitive Foundations of Learning Argumentation

Merce Garcia-Mila and Christopher Andersen

The goal of the present chapter is to provide a cognitive analysis of the competen-cies involved in argumentation: the psychological processes involved in argumen-tation, how these processes develop, and most importantly, given the scope of the present book, how this development relates to science learning. For the latter, we need to situate the role of argumentation in science learning, and this is the focus of the first section of the chapter, where the case of the importance of argumenta-tion in the new approaches of science will be made. Argumentation, however, is a very broad, multidisciplinary, and polisemic term, and thus is used differently within and between disciplines. The second section is an attempt to clarify the term. We will devote the third section to concretizing which aspects of argumentation specifically relate to science education, in order to make a cognitive analysis of these aspects in the fourth and fifth sections. Finally, the last section addresses what the literature says about scaffolding argumentation. In other words, we will try to answer the questions science educators may pose in order to deal with argumenta-tion in their science classes: What are the main difficulties students meet when they engage in argumentation? What should we expect from young children in an ele-mentary class in terms of their competencies to argue? In what ways are these competencies different when we compare elementary with secondary school stu-dents? What are they built upon? What is the role of metacognition in their devel-opment? Our underlying main claim is that argumentation is a process involved in general knowledge acquisition, regardless of whether it is individual silent learning or collaborative learning, and following Siegel (1989) it is aimed at the rational resolution of questions, issues, and disputes.

Science, Science Learning, and Argumentation

Whatever the discipline (philosophy, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, psychol-ogy, education, etc.), there is widespread consensus among science analysts that science is not the unequivocal and uncontested knowledge generated by a direct reading of nature that the positivist perspective used to claim. Instead, science is seen as a social construction that results from inquiry processes (planning and

S. Erduran and M. P. Jiménez-Aleixandre (eds.), Argumentation in Science Education. 29© Springer 2007

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performing experiments), as well as from communication and public scrutiny processes among the scientific community that lead to discussions addressed to resolve controversies and reach consensus. Scientific discursive practices such as assessing alternatives, weighing evidence, interpreting texts, and evaluating the potential validity of scientific claims are all seen as essential components in con-structing scientific arguments, which are fundamental in the progression of scien-tific knowledge (Latour, 1987; Latour & Woolgar, 1986). Socio-constructivists such as Lemke stress that to understand how scientists elaborate their view of the world, we must understand how they exchange ideas and how they change their opinions in response to evidence: that is, the way they use cultural resources to make meaning, analyzing the progressive sequence of what they say, the diagrams they draw, the equations they write, and see the effect of all this on making mean-ings. According to this, to learn science is not to know what the last generation of scientists thinks of the world, but to find out how each new generation of scientists re-elaborates our view of the world (Lemke, 2002). Thus, the goal of science edu-cation should be to prepare the students to use this combination of cultural resources described significantly and appropriately.

Though this perspective of science is widely held by researchers in science edu-cation, it has not been reflected in the practice of science education. As Driver, Newton, & Osborne (2000) clearly describe the situation, “Science in schools is commonly portrayed from a ‘positivist perspective’ as a subject in which there are clear ‘right answers’ and where data lead uncontroversially to agreed conclusions” (p. 288). As a consequence, science knowledge is seen as a “finished” product that must be learned as literally as possible.

As a result, there is increasing attention being drawn by science education researchers to the mismatches between the nature of science and the teaching of science. “Given the socially constructed nature of scientific knowledge, we must give a much higher priority than is currently the case to discursive practices in gen-eral and to argument in particular” (Driver et al., 2000, p. 297). Along this line but from the developmental psychology perspective, Kuhn (2005) establishes the goal of science education as promoting a way of thinking in which inquiry and argument are two central skills. There, current approaches to science education establish more or less explicitly the importance of argumentation in the acquisition of scien-tific knowledge among science students.

The Many Meanings of Argumentation

Despite this consensus, the concept of argumentation involves diverse meanings. Since these different uses of the concept directly affect the psychological processes involved, we need to clarify the concept in order to discuss the cognitive founda-tions underlying the learning of argumentation. Argumentation has a long tradition as an object of study and analysis, although it has not yet resulted in a universally accepted theory (van Eemeren et al., 1996). It has been studied from diverse

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disciplines with different criteria of analysis not necessarily shared even within the discipline. As an example of this disparity, arguments can be defined according to a validity criterion; some authors may require deductive validity exclusively pro-vided by formal syllogistic reasoning (Copi, 1972), while others radically critical of this classical position regard argument as a justified assertion whose validity is provided by the coherence of the justification (Toulmin, 1958). Within this coher-ence, “warrants” play a central role in the justification by connecting data with claims, but they allow qualifying adverbs such as “usually,” “presumably,” which would clearly lead to an invalid deductive argument from the syllogistic reasoning perspective.1 In contrast, for those who claim that argumentation is the art of per-suasion, the quality criteria should be soundness, plausibility, and persuasiveness of the audience, in addition to deductive validity (Chinn & Anderson, 1998; Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969). In addition to this lack of consensus in the criteria for validity of arguments, there are other aspects in the way argumentation is conceptualized that are also controversial. In this sense, different authors would conceptualize argument differently according to its position along criteria con-tinua such as product–process, individual–social, internal–external, oral–written, rhetoric–dialogical, and formal–informal, with the consequent implications for a psychological analysis.

For example, can any inner deliberation (as an individual internal silent process that leads to a justified assertion) be considered an argument? Or does it need a juxtaposition of two opposing assertions in a dialogue between two people who hold opposing views, supported by justifications with rebuttals that address the other’s view by means of a counterargument? Van Eemeren et al.’s (1996) pragma-dialectical approach seems very clear in this respect. They claim that argumentation is approached with four basic metatheoretical or methodological premises in the sense that they concern how one ought to set about studying argumentation: exter-nalization, socialization, functionalization, and dialectification. Their commonly cited definition shows this position:

A verbal and social activity of reason aimed at increasing (or decreasing) the acceptability of a controversial standpoint for the listener or reader, by putting forward a constellation of propositions intended to justify (or refute) the standpoint before a rational judge. (p. 5)But argumentation does not consist of a single individual privately drawing a conclusion: It is part of a discourse procedure whereby two or more individuals who have a difference of opinion try to arrive to an agreement. (p. 277)

In contrast with this position, and for the sake of fulfilling the chapter goal of pro-viding a cognitive analysis of the skills involved in argumentation, we will take a different position and answer this question using Kuhn’s (1991, 2005) approach to argumentation. Along with Billig (1987), Kuhn’s main claim to address this issue is that what makes a justification process a real (reasoned) argument is the possi-bility to conceive of alternatives (opposing assertions correctly justified) that bear

1 See van Eemeren (1996) concerning the ambiguity with which Toulmin establishes the validity of an argument.

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on the possibility of the assertion to be wrong. This whole process requires a weighing process to reach a justified position. It is in this sense that the individual internal process that leads to an assertion with accompanying justification can be considered an argument, because it implicitly contains a full dialogic argument as that defined in a broad sense, with social (dialogic) and individual (rhetorical) argument closely connected:

An individual constructs an argument to support a claim. The dialogic process in which two or more people engage in debate of opposing claims can be referred to as argumenta-tion or argumentive discourse to distinguish it from argument as product. Nonetheless, implicit in argument as product is the advancement of a claim in a framework of evidence and counterclaims that is characteristic of argumentive discourse. (Kuhn & Franklin, 2006, p. 979)

Subscribing Kuhn’s and Billig’s position, Anderson et al. (2001) illustrate the assumption of reasoning as a process of argumentation and thus fundamentally dialogical by appealing to Bakhtin’s (1934, 1981) idea of the multiple voices in the thinkers’ minds that represent contrasting perspectives on an issue. Kuhn’s integration of Billig’s view into a psychological analysis provides a methodological framework to look at the rational activities that extend from the individual reason-ing process of a child trying to build a theory to the social reasoning involved in public debates to reach consensus. Departing from Kuhn’s distinction, the internal weighing process of positive and negative evidence that leads to choosing a given assertion over others is considered an “implicit full dialogic argument.” Kuhn’s claim facilitates us in the task of analyzing the reasoning process involved in learn-ing science. Science learning, as well as any learning mediated by discursive prac-tices, would require (among other skills more closely related to inquiry) a set of argumentation skills. These skills could be both intrapsychological, that is, internal, individual, but implicitly dialogic, and interpsychological, that is, external, social, and explicitly dialogic. These two types of skills, though not identical, share a core of psychological processes. The argumentation involved in public debates, such as those held in science classrooms, needs an additional set of skills related to the presence of an audience in addition to the intrapsychological dialectical process of weighing positive and negative evidence to make a justified claim. Our analysis of argu-mentation will start with a look at what the literature says about the use (or lack) of all these skills among our students, to proceed to the cognitive analysis of the diffi-culties associated with such use.

Science Students and Argumentation

There is a move among science education researchers toward the analysis of argumen-tation in science classroom environments with the goal to investigate students’ ability to argue and the difficulties they experience when they engage in argumentation. What are the students’ interactive argument skills in a classroom debate? How do they argue when they are organized in small groups or in pairs? Despite the methodological

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difficulty inherent in this research, their results point in the same direction as those generated by research in developmental psychology: that is, students have diffi-culty engaging with another’s statements. They tend to make their own claims without addressing their opponent’s claim. In addition, they use simple claims to make their disagreement explicit, without taking into consideration alternative views that would potentially generate counterarguments or rebuttals. For example, Pontecorvo and Girardet (1993) worked with 9-year-olds arguing in small groups. They showed a high majority of utterances addressed to espousing their own claims and justifications of them, ignoring the partner’s claims. Results with older students paint a similar picture. Jiménez-Aleixandre et al. (2000) analyzed argumentation in a 9th-grade genetics class and found that most of the claims offered in a discussion were unrelated to the rest of the elements in the argument.

Beyond these weaknesses specific to argumentation in discursive practices (Anderson et al.,1997, 1998, 2001; Candela, 2002; Duschl & Osborne, 2002; Erduran et al., 2004; Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000; Jiménez-Aleixandre & Pereiro-Muñoz, 2002; Kelly & Chen, 1999; Kelly & Crawford, 1997; Osborne et al., 2004; Pontecorvo & Girardet, 1993; Reznitskaya et al., 2001), the above-mentioned studies and others show a set of skills that need to be in place in sound argumentive reasoning, be it either external in a public debate or internal in scien-tific reasoning such as the construction of two-sided arguments or the distinction between data and explanation in support of other claims (Brem & Rips, 2000; Kuhn, 1991; Kuhn et al., 1997; Perkins, 1985; Voss & Means, 1991). The lack of these skills, reported in both the science education (Chinn & Brewer, 1998; Driver et al., 2000) and in the developmental literature (Kuhn et al., 1988, 1995), leads to strong confirmation biases either selecting evidence to confirm prior theories or assessing it differently (or even ignoring it), according to whether it confirms or disconfirms prior theories, jumping to conclusions before enough evidence is available, etc. In the following sections, we will return to these problems, approaching them from the psychological processes involved. Argumentation involved in discursive practices will be analyzed as interpsychological argumenta-tion, while argumentation involved in individual scientific reasoning will be analyzed as intrapsychological argumentation. Our claim is that they share the core cogni-tive requirements involved in inferential thinking. To engage in sound argumen-tive practices, apart from the skills to address the strengths and weaknesses of the audience by connecting arguments, counterarguments and rebuttals, the scientific reasoning skills need to be in place as well. On the other hand, according to the Vygotskian (1981) perspective, interpsychological practices are essential to develop scientific reasoning.2 For expository purposes, they will be addressed in separate sections.

2 See Hickman’s thoughts on differences between individual and collective argumentation with respect to structures and processes and how they can function as a developmental mechanism (Hickman, 1987) and Anderson et al. (2001) for an empirical analysis on this issue.

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Interpsychological Argumentation

This section argues that the essence of argumentation in discursive practices is an externalized explicit dialectical activity, where two or more minds engage in a debate through a series of claims, counterclaims, and rebuttals. As Hickman (1987) puts it, “Usually they (argumentations) consist of a sequence of utterances whose content may—but need not—enter the argument to be developed. However, an argumentation only succeeds if the participants manage to develop a joint argument that is collectively accepted as an answer to the quaestio” (p. 232). The main com-ponents of argumentation (claim, counterclaim, and rebuttal) are familiar to anyone who has seen a political debate. But as we have seen, despite the familiarity of the structure, both students and adults have difficulty engaging effectively in argumen-tation. Skilled argumentation has two goals: (1) to secure commitments from the opponent that can be used to support one’s own argument, and (2) undermine the opponent’s position by identifying and challenging weaknesses in his/her argument (Walton, 1989). Felton and Kuhn (2001; Felton, 2004), based on Walton (1996) and van Eemeren et al. (1996), provide a framework to analyze interactive arguments. They establish three goals the speaker must address in argumentation: (1) to iden-tify the premises necessary to justify a claim, (2) to identify unwarranted claims in the partner’s argument in order to undermine them, and (3) to rebut or neutralize challenges that the partner advances against his or her argument. Involved in this is the ability to direct discourse with questions, critiques, and rebuttals, with the challenge of being able to lead the process of “competitively co-constructing an argument in the context of discourse,” that is, to be aware of which discourse strate-gies address their partner’s reasoning (Felton, 2004, p. 37). The understanding of such goals and the application of effective strategies to meet these goals are, according to Felton (2004; Felton & Kuhn, 2001), the two parameters in the analy-sis of the development of argumentive discourse.3 When one wants to undermine the opponent’s claim, she or he needs to think of her or his weaknesses and regain the strength of the claim. Thus, to study development of argumentive discourse strate-gies, the analysis must focus on the progress from simple forms of arguments such as “disagree” (where the goal is to expose one’s own point of view, without address-ing the opponent’s claim) to the use of counterarguments and rebuttals (where the two goals mentioned above—awareness of the partner’s weaknesses and a move to regain the strength of one’s own claim—are addressed).

These argumentive discursive strategies were analyzed from a developmental per-spective (Felton & Kuhn, 2001). They compared adolescents’ and adults’ peer dia-logues on the topic of capital punishment and found that the adolescents did not tend to take the audience into consideration and thus did not adapt their discourse. More con-cretely, they reported how adults used counterarguments more often than adolescents, and how their discourse also showed more moves to weaken the opponents’ claim.

3 See Felton and Kuhn’s (2001) system of categories for the analysis of strategies in argumentive discourse.

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The adolescents’ poorer performance in addressing the opponents’ discourse could be interpreted in terms of their difficulties in the construction of arguments themselves. In its most basic conception, argumentation involves producing justified claims, produc-ing counterarguments, and rebutting counterarguments. In producing justified claims, several alternative theories must be coordinated with evidence in order to choose the evidence that best fits the justification of one of the theories. This may happen not only in explicit dialogic debates, but also in written argumentive texts or in individual verbal interviews. Along this line, there is some work in which verbal interviews are used to analyze the construction of arguments in its dialogic form (Means & Voss, 1996).

Kuhn (1991) compared adolescents and adults’ ability to offer a valid supporting argument for a given claim (i.e., why prisoners return to crime when they are released), as well as offer counterarguments and rebuttals for that claim. Only one-third of the adolescent sample versus one-half of the adults were able to provide a justified claim. In addition, very few subjects in both samples were able to succeed in producing counterarguments or rebuttals.

Similarly, Means and Voss (1996) analyzed 5th to 11th and 8th to 12th-grade children’s (in two different studies) oral protocols generated in response to given topics (for instance, questions about drugs effects and drugs use). Protocols were analyzed according to the number of reasons, qualifiers, counterarguments, and type of argument structure. They also report a relatively poor performance in gen-erating the different elements of arguments. As stated by the authors (Voss & Van Dike, 2001), this appears to be in conflict with other research that shows that when young children engage in disputes, rather than ending them with a “no” response, they arrive at a mutually acceptable alternative proposition (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; Stein & Miller, 1993). To reach this primitive kind of consensus, children must be able to generate counterarguments. Other studies show that as early as 5 years of age children can produce justifications and rudimentary forms of counter-arguments (Anderson et al., 1997). In fact, as Piaget suggested, quarrels about actions, such as common disputes for a toy, precede genuine verbal arguments, which are produced at around 7 or 8 years (Billig, 1987). Then, how can these dif-ferent results be explained? The following section tries to answer this question by analyzing the psychological processes involved in the argumentive reasoning required in both the external social argumentation and the internal individual one.

Intrapsychological Argumentation

Difficulty in engaging in effective argumentation begins with difficulty in formu-lating an effective argument. In this section, we will focus on the internal dialectical coordination between theories, evidence, and methodologies4 that defines scientific

4 Moshman adds “methodologies” to Kuhn’s definition of scientific thinking as “the consciously controlled coordination between theory and evidence,” which according to our view gives a new emphasis by adding the assessment of (or at least a reflection of) the methods used to generate data.

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reasoning (Kuhn & Franklin, 2006; Moshman, 1998). Research on scientific rea-soning has a long tradition in cognitive psychology (Zimmerman, 2000). This research has focused on either inquiry skills (i.e., the processes involved in experi-mental design to generate evidence to submit theories to testing) or on inference skills (i.e., the process involved in the interpretation and evaluation of different sources and types of evidence to reach conclusions, and the consideration of alter-native explanations of the data in an internal dialogue), or more recently, on both simultaneously. These inference skills are the ones addressed in this section with particular attention to their relation to knowledge acquisition.

To make the analysis of the processes involved in argumentation, and how they develop, we take Moshman’s (1998) distinction between “inference,” “thinking,” and “reasoning.” He establishes that inference, defined as the generation of new cognitions from old, is normally performed automatically and unconsciously from a very early age. In contrast, thinking is defined as an advanced form of inference in the sense that is involves a deliberate coordination of one’s inferences to serve one’s purposes as the thinking involved in justifying a claim or testing a hypothesis (Moshman, 1995). Finally, Moshman defines reasoning as an advanced form of thinking that appears when thinking is evaluated with respect to how well it serves the purposes of the thinker:

Over the course of development, thinkers increasingly make such evaluations themselves and attempt to improve their inferential activities. Recognizing that some thought proc-esses are more justifiable than others, they increasingly construct standards of rationality and apply these to their own thinking. To the extent that an individual attempts to constrain his or her thinking on the basis of self-imposed standard of rationality, we may say the individual is engaged in reasoning. Reasoning, then, is epistemologically self-constrained thinking. (Moshman, 1998, p. 953)

These different cognitive processes differ in terms of the degree of rationality involved. Our claim for the developmental analysis that proceeds is that think-ing in Moshman’s sense will be related to the justification of a claim, while reasoning will be related to argumentation. The dialectical coordination between theory, evidence, and methodologies is involved in the process of thinking, while reasoning involves, in addition to the former, the process of coordinating mul-tiple claims in a framework of evaluating multiple alternatives and evidence (Kuhn, 1991).

As the literature organized around conceptual change shows (Carey, 1985; Carey & Smith, 1993; Keil, 1998; Vosniadou & Verschaffel, 2004), children from an early age construct implicit theories that are constantly reviewed in their interac-tion with the world, but this construction is not intentionally addressed to seek knowledge: instead, it is unconscious. Thus, while automatic inferences are made from a very early age, the deliberate efforts to constrain thinking in order to gener-ate a justified conclusion in a debate is a late development milestone. Let us imag-ine we are in preschool class. When Maria (3-year-old) knows that a hidden classmate could be a girl or a boy, and it is not a girl, she concludes that he is a boy. Can we say that she made the inference p or q, not p; therefore q? (example adapted from Moshman, 1998, p. 956). In other words, can we say that she was

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thinking deductively or she simply made an inference? In fact, did she intend to reach a conclusion? Did she know that she had made an inference or that her con-clusion followed necessarily from her premises? According to the analysis made above, “logical inference gives rise to logical thinking as children become increas-ingly purposeful in the application and coordination of such rules of logic. Logical thinking, in turn gives rise to logical reasoning as individuals increasingly grasp the epistemic properties of logical rules” (Moshman, 1998, p. 956).

The latter is only possible when, according to Piaget, thought itself becomes an object of cognition, and it is not attained until the formal operational stage, not before adolescence. Just then is when a mind, for instance, should be able to think of a validity of a proposition regardless of whether it is true or false. Adolescents on average outperform children in tasks aimed at assessing these competencies, but their performance varies greatly among adolescents, and is also far from reaching ceiling. This variability has been shown to strongly depend on the type of task. The previous example shows a case of argumentation based on syllogistic reasoning, and it clearly illustrates Moshman’s distinction between inference, thinking, and reasoning. Current literature shows that arguments that involve pure logic reasoning are very rare in everyday argumentation (Hickman, 1987).

Let us see another example where argument may be present. Imagine a science class with the intent to show the concept of flotation and density. Is it appropriate to use a demonstration of a system in which children infer the causality of different balls (big or small, plastic or lead, blue or red) to result in sinking or floating? In this task, children should be able to isolate a cause that is presented in a combined manner (i.e., red, lead, big ball). The evaluation of the evidence generated by this demonstration is one of Piaget’s competencies supposed to develop along with the above-mentioned deductive thinking. However, a study with a simpler form of this task shows that, as early as four, children can identify the isolate cause in a multi-variable context (Schultz & Gopnik, 2004). Nevertheless, when in a causal reason-ing task like this, the child or the adult has theoretical expectations, the evaluation of evidence becomes a much harder job. Our own work (Kuhn et al., 1992, 1995) as well as others’ (Cheng & Novick, 1992; Chinn & Brewer, 2001; Klaczynski, 2000; Klahr, 2000) show how easy it is for the adolescent and even the adult to ignore evidence that contradicts their expectations or to interpret it either partially, recognizing only those data that fit their expectations; or differently, according to whether it confirms or disconfirms their prior theories; or even more biased, distort-ing the data to make it fit. Isn’t this a case in which the thinker must set an internal dialogue between what the evidence is showing, what theory derives from it, and what his or her own prior theory says in order to decide which one is most valid, in relation to the coherence between data and theory and also, assessing the methodol-ogy used to reach such evidence (for instance, awareness of the need to generate controlled comparisons)? This is exactly the case of dialectical argumentation raised above that should be based on the conscious coordination between theory, evidence, and methodology.

Developmental research shows progress in this conscious coordination from middle childhood to early adulthood (Kuhn et al., 1988). This is not much novelty,

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but what’s important is, again, the high variability not only between subjects, but also within a single subject. This has been seen in microgenetic studies in which multiple strategies from less to more valid coexist. Within different ages, individu-als display a variety of different reasoning strategies, ranging from less to more effective. Over time, what changes is the frequency of usage of these strategies, with a general decline over time in the usage of less effective strategies and increase in the use of more powerful ones (Kuhn et al., 1995). This high variability is not only seen among preadolescents. When adults are asked to engage in a complex task involving coordination of multiple factors, valid inferences are not always within the subject’s competence. Yet, the more important finding is that even when a valid inference is used, it is not consistently applied. This finding highlights the fact that a metacognitive component is needed to explain this variability in scien-tific reasoning.

The distinction between knowing how to execute a strategy versus understand-ing its significance and still having the competence to distinguish between different sources of knowledge are metacognitive competencies required for the conscious differentiation and coordination of theory and evidence. When individuals lack this conscious control, they tend to merge theory and evidence into a single representa-tion of the way things are. Such control requires an epistemological understanding, which is a metalevel of knowing how one knows (Kuhn, 2001). Getting specific to argumentation and the learning of science, these competencies include the distinc-tion between the (natural) world and the knowledge of that world (Driver et al., 2000). The former exists (as an assumed reality), while the latter is constructed by our minds (as a human construction). A further step is then to become aware of the sources of one’s knowledge and how one gets to know.

Therefore, before effective arguments can be constructed, there are epistemo-logical and cognitive precursors that need to be in place. Argument has implied conventions of strength of argument, and there are developmental differences that prevent the understanding of these strengths. This leads to the cognitive require-ments and precursors of argumentation. By conceptualizing argumentation as the internal dialogue involved in the coordination of theories and evidence, we can draw on Kuhn and Pearsall’s (2000) analysis of the origins of this process. First, the theoretical claim must be recognized as falsifiable. Second, the evidence must be recognized as means of falsifying a theoretical claim. And third, theory and evi-dence must be recognized as distinct epistemological categories. These three requirements are the foundations which epistemological understanding is based on and developed from. The understanding of knowing and the nature and limits of knowledge in the sense of the actions involved in its justifiability is addressed in Perry’s (1970) classic work with college students (Hofer & Pintrich, 2002), and developmentally in Hofer and Pintrich (1997). Results of this research show that there are different stages that represent the sequence of epistemological under-standing. However, regardless of the number of stages proposed by the authors, they all suggest an invariable sequence that goes from a dualistic (right or wrong) and objectivist (scientific knowledge is true knowledge validated by scientific research) conception of knowledge to a more subjectivist and relativistic view,

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according to which knowledge is generated by a personal construction that ends up being contextualized and relative, in the sense that not all constructions show the same validity. This research has acquired considerable relevance with the new field that works with preschoolers in the search of the epistemic origins: the Theory-of-mind approach (Flavell, 1999; Perner, 1991). Kuhn and Franklin (2006) connect these two bodies of research, integrating them in a developmental pattern of the epistemic cognition. The resulting product is a developmental pattern with four steps, according to how the products of knowing are understood: Realist as copies, Absolutist as facts, Multiplist as opinions, and Evaluatist as judgments. In the realist level, children consider assertions to be copies of an external reality, with knowledge coming from an external source, which make critical thinking unnec-essary. This level does not meet any of the above-mentioned criteria for coordi-nating theory and evidence. Around the end of the preschool years, children begin to recognize that mental representations are products of the mind, and that they do not necessarily mirror external reality, thus becoming susceptible of fal-sification (Absolutist level). At this level, the representation of reality can be right or wrong, and critical thinking is the means by which assertions and reality can be compared and assessed. This is the basis from which scientific reasoning can emerge. Nevertheless, much progress is still needed to jump into reasoning as argumentation. From the ability to distinguish between generalizations and data, which according to some developmental research (Ruffman et al. 1993; Sodian et al., 1991) appears as early as six, to the metatheoretical understanding required to consciously coordinate theories, evidence, and methodology, there is a long-term development that gets consolidated during the adolescent years. Adolescents dis-cover that people can disagree: knowledge consists of freely chosen opinions rather than facts, clearly generated by the human mind and uncertain, which makes criti-cal thinking irrelevant. It corresponds to the multiplist level of epistemological understanding, represented by the adolescent’s feeling that “Because everyone has the right to their opinion, all opinions are equally right.” In order to advance to the fourth category of epistemological understanding, adolescents must add to this the feeling that “some opinions are more right than others to the extent that they are better supported by argument and evidence” (Kuhn, 2005, p. 32). This thinking is repre-sented by the Evaluatist level, in which assertions are judgments that can be evaluated to build arguments. Research on the development of epistemological understanding shows that the last step is not universally acquired, with its acquisi-tion related to the amount of specific knowledge (Kuhn et al., 2000). In a develop-mental study, these authors found that the most common pattern in adolescents and adults was the multiplist. Given that for the multiplist any claim is as valid as any other, there is no point at engaging in an argument. This is how Kuhn explains the low performance achieved by students when they are asked to participate in debates. Research, on the other hand, shows a positive correlation between high levels of epistemological understating and argumentation, and more concretely, with learning science:

If facts can be ascertained with certainty and are readily available to anyone who seeks them, as the absolutist understands, or, alternatively, if any claim is as valid as any other,

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as the multiplist understands, there is little reason to expend the intellectual effort that argument entails. One must see the point of arguing to engage in it. This connection extends well beyond but certainly includes science, and in the field of science education a number of authors have made the case for the connection between productive science learning and a mature epistemological understanding of science as more than the accumu-lation of facts. (Kuhn & Franklin, 2006)

The coordination of theory, evidence, and methodology along the adolescent years facilitating the implicit internal dialogue (argumentation) is thus a metacognitive achievement. Using Piaget’s terms, it entails mental operations on mental opera-tions. Contrary to their depiction of second-order operations emerging at adoles-cence, however, it has been recognized that metacognitive thinking about one’s thought begins to develop much earlier. Thus, rather than studying when they developmentally appear, the problem becomes that of analyzing how they can be fostered, and how these fostering conditions can be applied in the classroom environments.

What Does Research Say about Scaffolding Argumentation?

The main claim of this chapter is that argumentation involves a set of core proc-esses: the coordination of theory, evidence, and methodology that are common in the internal dialogic argumentation involved in scientific reasoning and the external dialogic argumentation involved in science discursive practices, both of them essential in science learning. Also there is a set of strategies specific to discursive practices, those that deal with Walton’s (1989) argumentation schema, as stated above. The key developing factor is metacognition (Kuhn, 2005; Kuhn et al., 1995) in its diverse forms (see above), either metastrategic (understanding the significance of using a given strategy versus simply being able to execute it) or metacognitive awareness (the ability to bracket one’s own prior theory and view alternatives), closely related to the epistemological com-petence to distinguish between different sources of knowledge. Also, specific for social debates, the arguer must be aware that one of the implicit goals in the argument is to undermine the partner’s claims (Felton, 2004). According to this, environments that foster any of metacognition types are hypothesized to enhance argumentation. Metacognition can be developed explicitly, by practices that promote explicit reflection. In this sense, there is some research that shows the effectiveness of such reflection in promoting argumentation. Felton (2004) for instance, had 7th and 8th graders work with their peer advisers on their previous dialogue guided by a checklist that helped them to identify the different elements in the debate and their quality. He had an experimental condition, where participants engaged in the dia-logue and paired reflection, and the control condition, where participants engaged only in dialogue. He found that experimental group participants showed greater advances in argumentive discourse than the control group, with the conclusion that practice and reflection is more effective than practice alone (see Kuhn, 2005; Duschl,this book an instructional program to develop argument skills, and the lesson plans

2 Cognitive Foundations of Learning Argumentation 41

in Quinn, 1997). Other studies in science education also show this benefit (Osborne et al., 2004; Zohar & Nemet, 2002).

Metacognition also can be fostered in an implicit manner. For instance the prac-tice provided in microgenetic studies shows a development of the scientific reason-ing strategies being practiced thanks to the parallel development of the metacognition involved (Kuhn et al.1995; Kuhn & Pearsall, 1998). This improvement is also observed when this methodology is used to analyze development of argumentive discourse strategies, not only in the quality of the arguments constructed by the individual, but also in the quality of the argumentive discourse generated in peer dialogues (Kuhn et al., 1997). Anderson and his colleagues (Anderson et al, 1997, 1998), under the collaborative learning paradigm, also show how extended engage-ment in argumentive discourse enhanced performance

Metacognition can also be implicitly fostered by means of writing activities. Writing has been hypothesized in the classic educational literature to be an epis-temic tool (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987). In this sense, writing would allow the representational redescription (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) to explain learning. This concept attempts to account for the way in which children’s representations become progressively more subject to manipulation and flexible, for the emergence of con-scious access to knowledge and theory building (p. 17). Despite the numerous studies devoted to analyze the role of writing in learning science (see the movement called the “writing-to-learn in science” (Klein, 2000; Prain & Hand, 1996; Rivard, 1994), few are devoted to scientific reasoning, and still fewer to argumentation as the external social dialogue, in spite of its potential role, clearly stated by Resnick (1987), as a cultivator and an enabler of higher order thinking, She claims that writ-ing provides the occasion to think through arguments and to master forms of rea-soning and persuasion. Our own work provides some results about the benefits of writing on scientific reasoning when students work individually (Garcia-Mila & Andersen, 2007; Garcia-Mila et al., 2006). More specifically related to argumenta-tion strategies involved in oral discourse, Kuhn and Udell (2003) report clear bene-fits of writing by providing a set of cards that facilitated the external representation of ideas, making the argument–counterargument–rebuttal structure explicit. From an ethnographic perspective, Kelly and Chen (1999) analyze oral and written dis-course processes in high school physics. They claim that by engaging in creating scientific papers, they make an appropriation of the scientific discourse.

Finally, the most implicit manner to enhance metacognition is by oral utterances themselves. This is an underlying claim present throughout the chapter in the stud-ies reviewed. Does the interpsychological form of argumentation enhance intrapsy-chological argumentation? This raises the issue of whether argumentation practices in small groups (or pairs) in the classroom, that is argumentation in its social form, may scaffold the internal dialog required in scientific reasoning. Despite the meth-odological difficulties (see Erduran, this book) that this analysis carries, there are several studies that show the benefits of participation in social dialogic argumenta-tion in students’ individual arguments, thanks to the externalization that discursive practices require (Felton, 2004; Pontecorvo & Girardet, 1993; Reznitskaya et al., 2001). Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach to learning has extensively shown the

42 M. Garcia-Mila and C. Andersen

benefits of peer collaboration in learning, under the assumption that differences in expertise (either in specific, strategic, or metacognitive knowledge) lead to the co-construction of knowledge by means of negotiation through language. Taking Vygotsky’s perspective, the point made here is that when this learning is generated by argumentation, either in its internal or external dialogic forms, the externaliza-tion of the dialectical processes required in a public argumentation plays an essen-tial role in the development of argumentation (Kuhn, 1991, Moshman, 1998). It is in this sense that science classroom activities should provide an epistemological and dialogical environment—far from the positivist conception of science—that fostered the awareness of how science progresses and most important, the value and need of arguing in the process of science knowledge construction (Osborne et al., 2004).

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