Building Our Best Future: Thinking Critically About Ourselves and Our World

Learning by arguing

“…Taken together, Studies 1 and 2 provide further empirical support for treating discourse as a productive path to individual written argument and in particular for a method that emphasizes direct peer-to-peer discourse (Kuhn et al, 2008;Kuhn et al, 2016a,b;Kuhn, 2018). Given the difficulty that students of all ages have with non-fiction writing, this finding is of broad practical significance, especially to the degree it extends to technical, complex subject matter students have limited familiarity with, as was the case in the present study.…”

Argument-based teaching

“…Real issues usually are of a general or socioscientific nature, whereas made-up issues can relate to any disciplinary field. Examples of real, ill-defined issues can be found in Kuhn (2018;e.g., animal testing, abortion, space waste, etc.). For made-up issues, some knowledge camouflaging process is necessary (Rapanta, 2019b).…”