Editorial to the special issue: Technological and pedagogical innovations for facilitation of students’ collaborative argumentation-based learning

This special issue on collaborative argumentation-based learning (CABLe) deals with the collaborative elaboration and application of concepts, articulation of ideas and standpoints, and socially sharing and discussing the approaches to learning-tasks. Students engaging in collaborative argumentation can acquire and co-construct knowledge through discourse when sharing and elaborating on their individual knowledge representations and developing new knowledge as a group. Moreover, argumentation supports taking and defending positions, negotiating meaning, discussing opposing and/or alternative viewpoints, resolving differences of opinion, and expanding one’s understanding.

Argumentation is a strange thing. From an early age, we construct reasons for our point of view, yet as adults we often cannot critically examine our own arguments or generate counterarguments using dialectic reasoning such as thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis and understanding that there is a difference between mere claims and well-founded arguments. This is complicated by cognitive, emotional and social barriers during discourse. Effective argumentation, which explores complex problem spaces and generates and identifies relations between different pro- and counterarguments, can be improved through targeted training and scaffolds for collaborative argumentation. In this special issue, we discuss how we can best facilitate motivational, cognitional and social processes of CABLe.

This special issue begins with research by Latifi and Noroozi, who employed a pre-test post-test control group design to study the extent to which an online peer-review script could facilitate higher education students’ quality of argumentative peer-review in the field of education. They also studied the extent to which such scripts could enhance students’ quality of argumentative essays in the post-test compared with their original essays in the pre-test. Content analysis coding schemes revealed that students who were guided through the peer-review script outperformed students who engaged in peer review activities without such script with respect to the quality of their argumentative peer-review and argumentative essay writing. Such findings imply the benefit of structure and clear-cut criteria for argumentative peer review activities to fully benefit from the potential of peer learning.

Vogel, Kollar, Ufer, Strohmaier, Reiss and Fischer explored the optimal scripting level for scaffolding argumentation during computer-supported collaborative learning. Specifically, they compared the impacts of three different levels of argumentative scripts on university freshmen’s argumentation mathematics knowledge and learning motivation. They found that students learn best when the argumentative script targets a medium level to scaffold the sequence of social discourse. No significant difference was found among the three levels of argumentative scripts regarding motivation. This finding contradicts the concern that a rigid and detailed structure of scripts may be detrimental to learning due to reduced learning motivation.

Nishiyama, Nussbaum and van Winkle employed positioning theory to explore how students in four racially and gender-mixed groups in the US interact and how they negotiate their status and power in a learning group when collaborating and arguing using a shared technological artefact. As expected, racial minority group members (especially female students) experienced lower status as measured by behavioural indicators. They also rated participation as more inequitable. The paper ends with a discussion on how to use positioning theory for studying collaborative interactions and argumentation in educational settings.

Tawfik, Koehler, Gishbaugher and Gatewood employed interaction analysis to compare the impacts of a problem representation prompt (executive summary of the problem) with a full problem-solving prompt (problem representation, alternatives, justification, evaluation) prior to collaborative argumentation. Students in the problem representation condition outperformed students in the full problem-solving condition on integrating feedback as interaction progressed. However, students in the full problem- solving condition outperformed students in the problem representation condition with regard to challenging the assertions of their peers. These findings are useful for understanding how to best use instructional prompts depending on the goals of collaborative argumentation.

In sum, this special issue provides empirical evidence on how to use technological and pedagogical innovations to enhance students’ CABLe and coping with challenges and difficulties of CABLe. Trust us: it’s really worth the effort!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Omid Noroozi

Omid Noroozi is a faculty member at the Education and Learning Sciences Chair Group, Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands. His research interests include Collaborative Learning, Argumentative Knowledge Construction, Online Peer Feedback, E-Learning and Distance Education, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Armin Weinberger

Armin Weinberger is head and founding professor of the Department of Educational Technology and Knowledge Management at Saarland University. His research interests center around the multimodal analysis of argumentation and the facilitation of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) through scripts and adaptive guidance in technology-enhanced learning environments.

Paul A. Kirschner

Paul A. Kirschner is emeritus professor of educational technology at the Open University of the Netherlands and guest professor on the Thomas More University of Applied Sciences in Belgium. His expertise includes collaborative learning, instructional design, distance education, and innovation in and of education.