Mark K. Felton

San Jose State University | SJSU · Teacher Education

Despite growing emphasis on learning to argue and arguing to learn as educational outcomes in the secondary curriculum, a gap remains between these curricular goals and teachers’ practices. The present study seeks to understand this gap by surveying 158 pre-service teachers about their knowledge, beliefs and predispositions related to argumentation...

Writing in science can be challenging for all learners, and it is especially so for students with cognitive or language-based learning difficulties. We examined the effects of a cognitive apprenticeship on student disciplinary writing skills as well as near and far transfer of learning outcomes. This instructional approach included a gradual releas...

Over the past 20 years, a broad and diverse research literature has emerged to address how students learn to argue through dialogue in educational contexts. However, the variety of approaches used to study this phenomenon makes it challenging to find coherence in what may otherwise seem to be disparate fields of study. In this integrative review, w...

Despite broad consensus on the value of classroom dialog for promoting scientific argumentation, tensions have emerged in the literature regarding the degree to which teachers should guide the dialogic process (dialogic stance). We use the lens of responsive teaching to examine how one teacher adjusts his instruction to foster dialog in three middl...

Studies of adolescents and young-adults suggest that deliberative dialogue, a form of consensus-seeking argumentation, leads to stronger learning outcomes than persuasive dialogue. However, this research has not been informed by an analysis of dialogue among more experienced arguers. In the present study, we compare the deliberative and persuasive...

The present study has two goals: to explore elementary students’ understanding of evidence and the ways they deploy it to construct arguments, and to examine whether eliciting their concept of evidence during argumentation improves students’ evidence-based reasoning. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 4th and 6th graders (N =...

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such...

Deliberative argument refers to a collaborative argumentative exchange in which speakers hold incompatible views and seek to resolve these differences to arrive at a consensual decision. Studies have shown that some of the features of deliberative argument emerge under conditions where the goals of argument are structured to promote consensus-seeki...

This integrative literature review takes up the ongoing discussion about the place of mixed methods designs in educational research. We focus on studies that investigate the role of argumentation in inquiry-based learning, either as a means for enhancing inquiry (argument-based inquiry) or as a learning outcome (inquiry-based argument). We argue th...

The inclusion of argumentative practices in classrooms as an epistemic tool to foster learning and reasoning has become widespread. However, studies on argumentation show that not all kinds of argumentation are equally effective in fostering this potential, and that argumentative goals are determining factors in the argumentative discourse — in par...

While research findings support elevated learning outcomes for students who engage in active science learning, faculty members are still resistant to employing these practices. In this article we describe the observable features found in 17 evidence-based, active, science instructional practices in order to address the discrepancy between the effec...

This study explores the impact of argumentative discourse goals on confirmation bias in young adults. All participants were presented three types of graphical evidence: data supporting their initial view, challenging their initial view and ambiguous data that could be interpreted either way. They were asked to use the evidence to write argumentativ...

This study explored the extent to which an 18-day history and writing curriculum intervention, taught over the course of one year, helped culturally and academically diverse adolescents achieve important disciplinary literacy learning in history. Teachers used a cognitive apprenticeship form of instruction for the integration of historical reading...

Research has shown that novice writers tend to ignore opposing viewpoints when framing and developing arguments in writing, a phenomenon commonly referred to as my-side bias. In the present article, we contrast two forms of argumentative discourse conditions (arguing to persuade and arguing to reach consensus) and examine their differential effects...

There is growing interest in using argumentative discourse in educational settings. However, in a previous study, we found that discourse goals (persuasion vs. consensus) while arguing can affect student outcomes in both content learning and reasoning. In this study, we look at argumentative discourse data from a previous study to ask how differenc...

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents’ understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers’ efforts t...

In this study, the effects of a disciplinary reading and writing curriculum intervention with professional development are shared. We share our instructional approach and provide writing outcomes for struggling adolescent readers who read at or below basic proficiency levels, as well as writing outcomes for proficient and advanced readers. Findings...

In argumentative discourse, there are two kinds of activity–dispute and deliberation–that depend on the argumentative task goal. In dispute the goal is to defend a conclusion by undermining alternatives, whereas in deliberation the goal is to arrive at a conclusion by contrasting alternatives. In this study, we examine the impact of these tasks goa...

The reasoning belief of argumentum ad nauseam assumes that when someone repeats something often enough, he or she becomes more convincing. The present paper analyses the use of this strategy by seventh-grade students in an argumentation task. Sixty-five students (mean age: 12.2, SD = 0.4) from a public school in a mid-sized urban environment took p...

This study examined the effects of historical reasoning strategy instruction on 11th-grade students. Students learned historical inquiry strategies using 20th Century American history topics ranging from the Spanish-American war to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In addition, students learned a pre-writing strategy for composing argumentative essays r...

Researchers in science education have converged on the view that argumentation can be an effective intervention for promoting knowledge construction in science classrooms. However, the impact of such interventions may be mediated by individuals’ task goals while arguing. In argumentative discourse, one can distinguish two overlapping but distinct k...

Resumen En los últimos años nuestras aulas de ciencias han incorporado la argumentación como una herramienta para promover la construcción de conocimiento. Un aspecto generalmente olvidado en dichas intervenciones, así como en las investigaciones de las cuales derivan, es el análisis del impacto que el objetivo de la argumentación tiene en la activ...

Museum educators often think about what they want children to take away with them from museum visits. But at least as important is what children bring to these visits. Research in developmental psychology shows that children and adolescents progress through a sequence of ways of understanding knowledge and knowing— understanding that lies at the co...

Museum educators often think about what they want children to take away with them from museum visits. But at least as important is what children bring to these visits. Research in developmental psychology shows that children and adolescents progress through a sequence of ways of understanding knowledge and knowing under­standing that lies at the co...

Earlier research [Discourse Process. 23 (2/3) (2002) 135] on argumentation suggests that adults use advanced discourse strategies more consistently, more frequently, and more flexibly than do adolescents. The present study examines the development of argumentation skills during adolescence. Forty-eight seventh and eighth graders were assigned to on...

The skills involved in argument as a social discourse activity presumably develop during the childhood and adolescent years, but little is known about the course of that development. As an initial step in examining this development, a coding system was developed for the purpose of analyzing multiple dialogues between peers on the topic of capital p...

The object of this research was to provide an explicit test of the hypothesis that engagement in thinking about a topic enhances the quality of reasoning about that topic. Engagement took the form of a series of dyadic discussions of the topic of capital punishment. At both age levels examined--early adolescence and young adulthood-this dyadic inte...

Per potenciar el pensament creatiu a classe cal comprendre les arrels d’aquest pensament en el raonament argumentatiu. El pensament crític inclou la recerca i l’avaluació de les raons que hi ha darrere d’una afirmació. Per prendre part en aquesta activitat d’investigació, cal entendre els elements sobre els quals es discuteix i com aquests es combi...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-156). Department: Teachers College.