P. Jermann & P. Dillenbourg Elaborating New Arguments through a Cscl Script

The CSCL community faces two main challenges with respect to learning and argumentation. The scientific challenge is to understand how argumentation produces learning, that is to discover which cognitive mechanisms, triggered by argumentative interactions, generate new knowledge and in which conditions. The engineering challenge is to determine how to trigger productive argumentation among students. These two challenges are often investigated in parallel, but this contribution focuses on the latter. There are two ways to favour the emergence of argumentation, either proactively, by structuring collaboration, or retroactively, by regulating interactions (e.g. a tutor monitors the pair dialogues). Structuring collaboration either means scripting collaborative activities or designing a dedicated communication tool. The features of such argumentation tools constitute a central concern of this book. This contribution addresses both forms of structuring. We describe ArgueGraph, a CSCL script encompassed in a web-based environment, and then compare two different interfaces for this environment. The notion of script enables us to formalize the educational context in which argumentation is expected to appear. A script is a story or scenario that students and tutors have to play as actors play a movie script. Most scripts are sequential: students go through a linear sequence of phases. Each phase specifies how students should collaborate and solve the problem. A phase is described by five attributes: the task that students have to perform, the composition of the group, the way that the task is distributed within and among groups, the mode of interaction and the timing of the phase (Dillenbourg, 2002). The ArgueGraph script fosters argumentation by forming pairs of students with conflicting opinions. Conflicting situations are of particular interest with respect to collaborative interaction because they enable socio-cognitive conflict (Doise & Mugny, 1981): a social conflict (having a different perspective) has to be solved through a cognitive coordination of the points of view. However, further studies showed that conflict is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition for cognitive change. Beyond the intensity of conflict, it is the verbalization necessary to solve the conflict, which seems related to learning effects (Blaye, 1988; Butterworth, 1982).