Abstract
The definition and the assessment of the quality of argumentative texts has become an increasingly crucial issue in education, classroom discourse, and argumentation theory. The different methods developed and used in the literature are all characterized by specific perspectives that fail to capture the complexity of the subject matter, which remains ill-defined and not systematically investigated. This paper addresses this problem by building on the four main dimensions of argument quality resulting from the definition of argument and the literature in classroom discourse: dialogicity, accountability, relevance, and textuality (DART). We use and develop the insights from the literature in education and argumentation by integrating the frameworks that capture both the textual and the argumentative nature of argumentative texts. This theoretical background will be used to propose a method for translating the DART dimensions into specific and clear proxies and evaluation criteria.
Highlights
Educational policy documents around the world increasingly emphasize the need to develop argument literacy skills in the classroom (Newell, Beach, Smith, & VanDerHeide, 2011; Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2015), the transversal and complex ability to support one’s viewpoint and address the viewpoints of others by providing arguments, counter-arguing, and refuting counter-arguments both in oral and written forms and in various disciplines (Graff, 2003, pp. 3–4)
An argumentative text can be considered of low quality even if the arguments used therein are good, as such arguments may be not related to overall goal of the essay or to each other (Choi, 1988; Paglieri, 2015; Witte & Faigley, 1981)
This paper addresses the challenge of developing a method for evaluating the quality of argumentative texts that integrates different dimensions and criteria
Summary
As the reviewed approaches point out, a good argument is a logical structure that includes the essential components thereof (premises and conclusion), and a complex textual and more importantly pragmatic unit (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984) that needs to be connected with the context, the interlocutor, a communicative goal, and a cognitive construct, in which the acceptability and validity of the conclusion and the premises need to be established considering their content and their epistemic dimension (captured by the backings and the evidence on which the premises are based) These aspects, emerging from the literature in education and argumentation, can be found partially in the linguistic studies that tackled the problem of evaluating texts that happen to be argumentative. Conditional Premise If source E is an expert in a subject domain S containing proposition A, and E asserts that proposition A is true (false), A may plausibly be taken to be true (false)
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