Designing to Promote Improved Online Educational Argumentation

An Evaluation Study

Abstract

Educational dialogue can be used to support learners in the development of reasoning, critical thinking, and argumentation. In this paper we report on the evaluation of an educational design for online peer discussion that guides student dialogue towards more academic interactions and facilitates extended argument. This design includes a mediating interface for synchronous discussion, implemented for this research, which incorporates a dialogue game approach to discussion, using sentence openers to structure interactions. The study employed a broader set of online educational activities – a designed local context, which aims to motivate higher education students to argue in a collaborative working setting. The evaluation compares the impact of using structured interactions with the use of a simple interface without structured interaction. The findings suggest an improved, deeper argumentation process in the structured environment.