Abstract:

In today's digital age, where misinformation or fake news proliferate online, poses significant challenges to individuals of all ages, especially for young students. How to empower individuals with the capacity to critically evaluate this fake news on the internet has been more crucial. To address this issue, we created an online synchronous collaborative argumentation activity in which students may argue in group regarding fake news to clarify and distinguish it. A quasi-experimental design was conducted, where one group of students received structured guidance in utilizing argumentation scaffolding for online synchronous collaborative argumentation, while another group engaged in similar activities without such assistance. Our study involved four classes, comprising a total of 102 sixth-grade students from an elementary school in South Taiwan, randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. We seek to evaluate the effectiveness of this argumentation scaffolding in enhancing their critical thinking abilities. The experiment unfolded over a five-week period, during which the students were involved in the intervention activities. Following this period, we conducted a pre-posttest using the “Critical Thinking Test” to compare the performance of the experimental and control groups. Furthermore, Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) was employed, utilizing nine pre-identified behavioral codes to analyze the dynamics and structures of interactions during online synchronous collaborative discussions on fake news among Taiwanese sixth graders.

The findings revealed that:
1. Students who received argumentation scaffolding assistance during online synchronous collaborative discussions on fake news demonstrated a notably greater improvement in critical thinking abilities compared to these who did not.
2. Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) underscores the centrality of articulating claims and progressively substantiating them with evidence in argumentation behaviors. Moreover, as the discourse unfolds, cooperative support behaviors among peers increasingly come to the forefront.
3. Examination of the distribution trends of network centroids within two distinct groups unveils divergent evolutionary trajectories, elucidating disparate behavioral profiles between the two cohorts.

Keywords:

Fake news, collaborative argumentation, critical thinking, Epistemic Network Analysis.