Collaborative argumentation in academic education

The general purpose of this research is todiscover principles for the design ofeducational tasks that provoke collaborativeargumentation. The specific research questionconcentrates on the relationship betweenquestion asking and argumentation and isexamined in three different collaborativelearning tasks involving advanced universitystudents. These studies aim at providingcriteria for organising educational situationsthat elicit argumentation during which opinionschange and new knowledge is being created,within constraints (course duration, examcriteria, student expectations) set by currenthigher education. We discuss some factorsinfluencing argumentation (the role of thestudent, peer, tutor, task, instruction andmedium) and specific attention is paid toquestion asking. Then we report three studiesconducted at our educational department. Thesestudies involve comparable students, a similardomain, but differ in many other respects: themode of communication (oral, typewritten), thepresence of the tutor, instruction onargumentation and/or question asking, assignedtask goals (competition, consensus), and thetype of required outcome. Each study revealsprominence of different types of questions andquestion generation mechanisms. In addition,the relations found between question asking andargumentation change between studies. Incomparing and interpreting these studies, wediscuss results in the light of provokingcollaborative argumentation in regular academiclearning situations.