Abstract
For a number of years, my colleagues and I (see acknowledgments) have been building, testing, and refining a diagrammatic environment (“Belvedere”) intended to support secondary school children’s learning of critical inquiry skills in the context of science (Suthers, Connelly, Lesgold, Paolucci, Toth, Toth, & Weiner, 2001; Toth, Suthers, & Lesgold, 2002). The diagrams were first designed to engage students in complex scientific argumentation with the help of an intelligent tutoring system. (For the purposes of this chapter, scientific argumentation is a dialectic in which participants mutually evaluate alternative hypotheses according to their consistency with empirical evidence and related criteria such as plausibility of the proposed causal explanations and reliability of the evidence. Participants may but need not necessarily take conflicting positions.) The diagrams were later simplified to focus on evidential relations between data and hypotheses. This change was driven in part by a refocus on collaborative learning (Koschmann, 1994; Slavin, 1980; Webb & Palincsar, 1996), which led to a major change in how we viewed the role of the interface representations. Rather than being a medium of communication or a formal record of the argumentation process, we came to view the representations as resources (stimuli and guides) for conversation and reasoning (Collins & Ferguson, 1993; Roschelle, 1994). Laboratory and field trials with Belvedere provided many examples of situations in which Belvedere’s diagrammatic representations appeared to be influencing learner’s argumentation. Meanwhile, various other projects with similar goals (i.e., critical inquiry in a collaborative learning context) were using substantially different representational systems (to be reviewed in this chapter). Finding that the literature lacked systematic research on this variable, I undertook a program of exploring the hypothesis that the expressive constraints imposed by a representation and the information (or lack of information) that it makes salient may have facilitative effects on students’ argumentation during collaborative learning.
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Suthers, D.D. (2003). Representational Guidance for Collaborative Inquiry. In: Andriessen, J., Baker, M., Suthers, D. (eds) Arguing to Learn. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0781-7_2
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