Abstract:

Recently, the Bologna Declaration of the European Higher Education Area has become a controversial topical subject in the educational communities. Among other measures to guarantee the European convergence in higher education, the declaration reformulates education around learning outcomes and characterises the different university degrees around the competencies that any student must have when he/she graduates. Therefore, when designing the syllabus, each course must specify which generic transversal competencies (such competencies that all graduate students should acquire) and degree specific competencies is covering. This means to make a drastic change in the usual objective-based educational methods that had been used to date at university. The use of learning outcomes and student competencies as reference points in curriculum design has given rise to the need of alternative learning methodologies and evaluation methods.
Collaborative learning is an effective learning methodology that can help students to develop many transversal (e.g. decision-making, social abilities, synthetic and analytic capabilities, etc) and degree specific competencies. Concretely, collaborative argumentation has been applied successfully in specific domains (mainly in law courses) as a method to improve critical thinking skills in students. Over the last years, several interesting tools for computer-supported argument diagramming have been developed. These tools provide a software environment for collaborative argumentation that represents graphically the discussion at hand and allows users to perform typical argumentation tasks (e.g. build and evaluate arguments, rebut them, counter-argue, etc). Argument diagramming tools have already been successfully applied in academic education. Their representational and dialogical features make them highly adequate to chair debates of on-line learning activities. Thus, they can be used both in distance learning courses and for performing group-based activities in classroom setting courses.
The paper pursues two main objectives: to analyse the characteristics of the current argument diagramming tools that make them suitable to develop activities to promote the students' collaborative learning and to propose them as a tool that can help lecturers to evaluate the competencies that students have gained by this learning methodology. Thus, this study will evaluate argument diagramming tools from different dimensions. First, the main features that each tool provides for facilitating collaborative learning will be evaluated and a comparison between the different tools will be shown. Second, their utility to provide lecturers with a powerful means to follow the learning process of their students will also be studied. By checking the argumentation line of students and their degree of participation in the activities proposed, lecturers can be able to evaluate the competencies that students have gained during the development of the activity in an efficient and fair way. This is an interesting advantage of argument diagramming tools, since university courses must not only be designed and organised around their covered competencies, but also their syllabus must specify the method to evaluate these competencies. Finally, this work will also provide some examples of activities that the lecturer may design for specific subjects and propose to their students, who have to solve them by using a specific argument diagramming tool.

Keywords:

collaborative learning, argument diagramming tools.