Abstract:

Promoting critical thinking skills is one of the challenges that school face this era (OECD, 2016). Several studies have identified dialogue or collaboration as a potential tool for promoting argumentation and critical thinking. However, collaborative argumentative dialogue does not always promote critical thinking, as students may be uncritical of each other's claims and even accept false or misleading information (Kuhn & Udell, 2007). To overcome these constraints some research has included training in critical questions (Walton, 2016), which has shown promising results in dyadic dialogue and question answering (Mayweg-Paus et al., 2016). However, little is known on how written argumentation changes when collaborative dialogue and/or critical questioning is applied.

The aim of this study is to identify the impact of providing secondary school students dyads with specific critical questions on their written argumentation. These critical questions aimed to help students identify and assess the quality of the arguments included in two contradictory source texts on the topic of school segregation (i.e. separating boys from girls).

Participants were 38 students (aged 15-16 years old), attending a public secondary school near Barcelona (49% male). Students were assigned to one of the two experimental conditions: 10 dyads in the dialogue condition (D), 9 dyads in the dialogue and critical question condition (DCQ).

In the first session, students responded the Test of Comprehension Strategies (TEC; Vidal-Abarca et al, 2007), to control for their comprehension.
In the second session, they received two journalistic articles on school segregation, one that included 5 arguments in favour of segregation, and another providing 5 arguments against it. While in the text in favour, the arguments came from organizations –some of which promoted segregation-, the arguments against it came from research studies from universities. Students were asked to write an argumentative text for a journal that answered the question “Is it advisable to separate students by gender in Secondary Education schools?”, including and contrasting the arguments from the two source texts.

In the final session, students in the D condition were asked to discuss the source texts in pairs before rewriting their text individually. Dyads in the DCQ, were given a list of critical questions requiring them to list the main arguments from the two source texts, to identify the institution the arguments came from, and if the data included in the argument was well explained before rewriting their text.

Preliminary t –Student analyses show that both groups were equivalent in the number of arguments they included in their first version of their argumentative text. Additionally, although DCQ students’ second version of their text included more arguments (M Arguments in favour =1.63; SD =1.21; M Arguments against =2.47, SD = 1.50), than the D students’ second version of the text (M Arguments in favour =1.1; SD =1.04; M Arguments against =2, SD = 1.37), the differences were not statistically significant.

We will discuss these results in light of the responses students in the DCQ condition gave to the critical questions and the difficulties they had to identify arguments in the source texts and to assess their quality.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, dialogue, argumentation, Secondary Education.