Improving Students' Evaluation of Informal Arguments

Evaluating the structural quality of arguments is a skill important to students' ability to comprehend the arguments of others and produce their own. The authors examined college and high school students' 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.