Improving Studentsʹ Evaluation of Informal Arguments

Evaluating the structural quality of arguments is a skill that is important to studentsʹ ability to comprehend the arguments of others and produce their own. The authors examined college and high school studentsʹ ability to evaluate the quality of 2-clause (claim-reason) arguments and tested a tutorial to improve this ability. These experiments indicated that college and high school students had difficulty evaluating arguments on the basis of their quality. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a tutorial explaining skills important to overall argument evaluation increased performance but that immediate feedback during training was necessary for teaching students to evaluate the claim-reason connection. Using a Web-based version of the tutorial, Experiment 3 extended this finding to the performance of high school students. The study suggests that teaching the structure of an argument and teaching students to pay attention to the precise message of the claim can improve argument evaluation.