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Collaborative Reasoning: A Dialogic Approach To Group Discussions, Alina Reznitskaya, Li Jen Kuo, Ann Marie Clark, Brian Miller, May Jadallah, Richard C. Anderson, Kim Nguyen-Jahiel

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

In this paper, we address the need to develop an empirically-based understanding of the use of dialogue in teaching by discussing theory and research related to a pedagogical approach called collaborative reasoning (CR). CR is an instructional method designed to engage elementary school children in group discussions about controversial issues raised in their readings. CR is grounded in social learning and schema-theoretic views of cognition, which are integrated to form a new model, called argument schema theory (AST). According to AST, students acquire generalizable knowledge of argumentation, or an argument schema, through participating in dialogic discussions with their peers. The …