The Effect of Task Instructions on Students’ Use of Repetition in Argumentative Discourse

Abstract

The reasoning belief of argumentum ad nauseam assumes that when someone repeats something often enough, he or she becomes more convincing. The present paper analyses the use of this strategy by seventh-grade students in an argumentation task. Sixty-five students (mean age: 12.2, SD = 0.4) from a public school in a mid-sized urban environment took part in the study. The students were asked to either argue to convince an opposing partner or argue to reach consensus with an opposing partner on three dilemmas that dealt with energy sources. Data were gathered according to a between-groups design that included one independent variable (argumentative goal: to convince vs. to reach consensus) and one dependent variable (the degree of argumentative repetitions). We predicted that in the condition to convince their partner, the students would use the repetition strategy more often in their attempts to be persuasive. Our findings show that the mean number of argumentative repetitions was significantly higher for the persuasion group for both of the most frequent argumentative structures (claim and claim data). The mean percentage of repeated claims for the persuasion condition was 86.2 vs. 69.0 for the consensus condition. For the claim data, the mean percentage for the persuasion group was 35.2 vs. 24.3 for the consensus group. Also, students in the persuasion group tended to repeat one idea many times rather than repeating many ideas a few times within the same argumentative structure. The results of our study support the hypothesis that the goal of the argumentative task mediates argumentative discourse and, more concretely, the rate of repetitions and the conceptual diversity of the statements. These differences in rates of repetition and conceptual diversity are related to the amount of learning produced by the instructional goal. We apply Mercer's idea that not all classroom argumentation tasks promote learning equally.

Keywords:

• Argumentation
• Discourse
• Learning

Acknowledgements

The present work was made due to the funding to the first author by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Spain) and by the European Social Funds (EDU/3600/2006) and to the second and third authors by the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain) with project numbers EDU2010-21995-C02-02 and SAB2010-0124 respectively.

Notes

The total sample consisted of 101 students. Sixty-five students were assigned to either the persuasion condition or to the consensus condition, and 35 students were assigned to a third condition that was not asked to argue to test the effect of argumentation in learning (Felton et al., 2009). Because the non-argumentative group is irrelevant for the purposes of the present study, this paper only takes into consideration the 65 students who were assigned to either of the two argumentative conditions.

Names are pseudonyms.