Impacts of a Digital Dialogue Game and Epistemic Beliefs on Argumentative Discourse and Willingness to Argue

Abstract

The goal of this study was to explore how students debate with their peers within a designed context using a digital dialogue game, and whether their epistemic beliefs are significant to the outcomes. Epistemic beliefs are known to colour student interactions within argumentative discourse, leading some students to hold back from interactions. By designing an online small group activity based around an issue both important and controversial to the students, with multiple viewpoints in each group and with the scaffolding provided by a dialogue game, it was examined whether these epistemic effects were still evident within their argumentative discourse. Furthermore, the study examined whether the activity design improves students' willingness to argue with each other, and their openness to attitudinal change. A pretest, posttest design was used with students who were assigned to groups of four or five and asked to argue on a controversial topic. Their aim was to explore various perspectives and to debate the pros and cons of the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). While previous research has shown that some epistemic beliefs lead to less critical engagement with peers, the results presented here demonstrate that activity design is also an important factor in successful engagement within argumentative discourse.

A systematic review on the impacts of game-based learning on argumentation skills

“…Argumentation is subject to interpretation and in some scenarios, the "facts" may be interpreted differently and are thus not necessarily immutable [82] & 2013)**. There are situational, emotional, and social barriers that are inherent to argumentation [66]. While some students might hold epistemic emotions (being anxious when receiving counter-arguments), others might be reluctant to oppose and disagree with peers or might not appreciate being challenged themselves [43].…”

“…They have remained part of lab experiments without being an explicit and integrated part of the curriculum within a particular discipline (see [29]). A key ingredient that is missing is motivating students to make their argumentation learning to appeal [66]. The importance of argumentation for people's lives, combined with well-documented deficiencies in performance, makes it imperative to use effective educational methods that support the development of argumentation [76].…”

“…GBL is known to be motivating and engaging to students across various educational levels [26], and they have rapidly become an important area of investigation within technology-enhanced learning environments due to their positive impacts on students' engagement, motivation, and learning (see [15,20,39,54,57,107]). Many scholars have indicated the potential of digital GBL to support learners in terms of conceptual understanding, process skills and practices, epistemological understanding and player's attitudes identity, and engagement [20,72,66]. Therefore, there is a huge demand for application of GBL in various domains such as business, math, statistics, computer science, biology, and psychology [72].…”

“…Therefore, there is a huge demand for application of GBL in various domains such as business, math, statistics, computer science, biology, and psychology [72]. Most of these GBL environments are supposed to help players acquire various 21st-century skills such as analytical, critical, argumentation, communication, collaboration skills, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision making [14,72,66,86].…”

A Procedural Content Generation-Based Framework for Educational Games: Toward a Tailored Data-Driven Game for Developing Early English Reading Skills

“…While educational games are often designed with a fixed progression of task difficulty, there have been calls for dynamic tailoring of difficulty on a per-player basis (Ben, 2011; da Rocha Seixas, Gomes, & de Melo Filho, 2016; Noroozi, 2016; Zook et al., 2012). Dynamic difficulty adaptation is a challenging problem; given the current broad diversity of player background skills, preferences, and motivations, this matching is typically difficult or impossible to achieve with any single, fixed progression (Metzger & Paxton, 2016; Noroozi, McAlister, & Mulder, 2016; Qian & Clark, 2016). Procedural content generation (PCG) offers an answer to this dilemma, in that it generates content automatically through algorithms, independent of a human designer (Shaker, Togelius, & Nelson, 2014).…”