Arguing to Learn

When students collaborate in argumentation in the classroom, they are arguing to learn. When viewed as a collaborative practice, argumentation can help learnersto accomplish a wide variety of important learning goals. First, argumentation involves elaboration, reasoning, and reflection. These activities have been shown to contribute to deeper conceptual learning. Second, participating in argumentation helps students learn about argumentative structures.  Third, because productive argumentation is a form of collaboration, it can help develop social awareness and collaborative ability more generally. Fourth, groups of people – at work, at home, or in social contexts – often share a common tradition of argumentation, and effective participation in these groups requires knowing how to argue competently within them. Argumentation theory   studies the production, analysis, and evaluation of argumentation. The goal is to develop criteria for judging the soundness of an argument. Currently, many learners feel argumentation is awaste of time; they simplywant their teachers to give them the answers. Piaget argued that learners should be allowed to discover as much as possible on their own, and that each decision that the teacher makes for them deprives them of a potentially more powerful learning experience.

1) In which period of education we should start using this approach?

2) For science education despite lots of definite rules, how can we decide to start an argument about an issue?