Review of some tools for Teaching Scientific Argumentation


Jean McKendree
Human Communication Research Centre
University of Edinburgh
www.hcrc.ed.ac.uk/~jeanmck

There has been a growing interest in research on argumentation and on the design of tools based on this research. This research is emerging in many disciplines including psychology, philosophy, rhetoric, law, AI, and business decision making. It seems (to me, at least) that viewing "argumentation" as a sort of generic structure across all of these areas is not going to be particularly fruitful. I am interested rather in seeing what is different about argumentation in these areas and developing more domain specific tools. As a start, I have been focusing on two questions: 1) what is a model of scientific argumentation as embodied in journal articles or textbooks and 2) what are tools that can help _teach_ a basic model of scientific argumentation, as opposed to supporting professional analysis or archiving of evolving discussions as in many of the IBIS-type tools. As a start to this start, I will review a few of the tools that are being used to teach scientific argumentation to high school and university students. I am intending this talk to be a catalyst for discussion and ideas. (I must note that none of the tools I will be presenting have been developed by me, though I was involved in one of the projects. You can try and guess which one.)