Argumentation skills are essential to individuals’ career prospects in future economies (National Research Council, 2008) and to the success of our democracy. Unfortunately, these skills are often challenging to teach, and there is a dearth of studies addressing “the teacher’s use of specific instructional methods” (Newell, et al. 2011) to promote argumentation skills over time. In my dissertation, I examine how urban public middle school teachers promote text-based argumentation skills in classroom discussion. I draw on data from the Catalyzing Comprehension through Discussion and Debate (CCDD) research project. Specifically, I look at transcripts from enactments of lessons in the Social Studies Generation curriculum, one of the four Word Generation curricula used as an intervention in the larger CCDD study. In the first study, I compare how two co-teachers help small groups of students prepare to argue in a classroom debate. I find that both teachers help students generate claim-evidence connections and counterarguments with “supportive prompting,” but they differ in how they engage with student-generated arguments. In the second study, I examine three different teachers facilitating a classroom debate on the same topic. I identify episodes of talk containing dialogic argumentation during debates and look across classrooms for patterns of teacher actions during these episodes. I find that teachers offer a series of four moves that help students sustain dialogic argumentation. In the third and final study, I investigate what students do in classroom debates in the context of an argumentation-supporting curriculum – what moves they make, what supports they use, and what other strategies they deploy. I find that students use evidence and explain how evidence supports their claims more than what might be expected given previous studies on argumentative classroom discussions. I discuss implications for practice and research in each study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/27112708 |
| Date | 31 May 2016 |
| Creators | Duhaylongsod, Leslie J. |
| Contributors | Snow, Catherine E. |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | open |
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