| Argumentation plays a key social and intellectual role in the construction of knowledge, but how we might socialize students into the practice of argumentation in school is less explored. In order to develop the theory and design of argumentation, this design-based research study investigates three middle school students' experience and their argumentative discourse in a 10-day curriculum designed for argumentation. To teach argumentation, I propose a situated argumentation hypothesis that foregrounds four aspect of argumentation design: epistemological, cognitive, social, and material. This design framework guides the conceptualization of game-based learning approaches, mainly role-playing simulation, open-ended challenges, authentic resources and tools, for dialogic and collaborative arguments.Using the proposed game-based learning approaches, Local Games Lab and I designed Saving Lake Wingra, a 10-day game-based learning curriculum for argumentation. The curriculum aims at restructuring classroom discourse for argumentation through three phases. The first phase (days 1-4) aims at reconditioning classroom discourse patterns from a usually teacher-centered and turn-taking format to a student-centered, dialogic, and collaborative format. Students also develop domain-specific knowledge by playing the Saving Lake Wingra Augmented Reality Game on handheld computers (with a game engine developed by MIT). The second phase (days 5-8) engages students in extended practices of dialogic and collaborative arguments as teams of three professionals. In the last phase (days 9-10), students present arguments collaboratively and individually to argue for the best interest of Lake Wingra.The results indicate that all three students participating in this study were socially and intellectually engaged in practicing and developing arguments about the future of Lake Wingra. Some constructed claims with supporting evidence and even counter claims proposed by peers, though the degree to which each participant was able to argue differed. Role-playing and open-ended knowledge representation alter how knowledge is viewed, empowering students to express opinions supported by evidence. Students also demonstrated difficulties in connecting claims with supporting evidence, which suggests that (1) conceptual understanding plays a key role in constructing evidence-based claims and (2) the situated argumentation hypothesis can be improved by foregrounding the importance of conceptual understanding in teaching argumentation. |
