Argument For Children Research Articles

Inconsistencies in the Ḥanafī School's View of Children's Legal Competence

This article examines the inconsistencies of the Ḥanafī school of thought regarding the legal capacity of children. The study of this issue is to prove whether or not there is harmony between the legal istinbat method (ushul fiqh) used and the legal product (fikih) created. In fiqh proposal it is determined that children do not have legal capacity so they are freed from all forms of legal imposition (taklif). The problem studied is the inconsistency of children's legal skills and arguments against this problem. This paper is based on qualitative data in the form of books on ushul fiqh and fiqh of thought from the Ḥanafī school of thought. Data is given meaning through verstehen, namely understanding by using a divergent, creative, and innovative mindset so that deeper meaning is found. After that, the data was analyzed using content analysis, namely taking inventory of data, simplifying it, and generalizing it. This is done interactively between the three components; data reduction, data presentation, and data verification. The results of the research show that there is an inconsistency in the Ḥanafī school of thought regarding legal competence. Inconsistency is seen in three ways; the standard has been and has not been the functioning of reason related to the age phases of the child, determining the impact of the benefits and harms contained in legal actions, and the scope of legal subjects. Thoughts on the legal skills of children other than the Ḥanafī school of thought which have not been studied in this paper need further research.

Children and Youth in Strategic Climate Litigation: Advancing Rights through Legal Argument and Legal Mobilization

AbstractChildren and young people constitute more than one quarter of all plaintiffs in rights-based strategic climate litigation cases filed globally up to 2021. This article examines the implications of this development for children's environmental rights inside and outside the courtroom, relying on the analysis of case documents, media coverage, and the broader literature on strategic climate litigation and children's rights. The article finds that children are well placed to make powerful arguments for intergenerational justice. Conversely, children's rights arguments that address their current-day grievances are under-utilized. More consistent inclusion of these types of claim could strengthen children's environmental rights, clarifying and enforcing legal obligations towards children in the context of the climate crisis as it unfolds. The involvement of children in strategic climate litigation, moreover, can advance the critical role of this demographic as stakeholder in climate solutions. However, the participation of children also raises ethical and practical dilemmas, which are currently poorly understood and only haphazardly addressed.

Exploring young children’s argumentation as a heuristic intertextual practice

Argumentation is a fundamental communicative ability that children develop over time through formal schooling and daily practice with peers and family members. Literature on children's argumentation appears to have focused on their social interactions out of school, clinical environment, or informal pedagogic contexts. Even though there are research inquiries into children’s argumentation in formal academic learning, many have been focused on argumentative writing in math or science classes. Much less is known about teacher-led argumentation and the youngest children's emerging argumentation in language art classes, where argumentation is formally and systematically introduced and learned. This paper reports a year-long ethnographic study on argumentation in a first-grade English language art classroom in the United States. Ethnographic discourse analysis was conducted to analyze two key literacy events from the daily reader's and writer's workshop. It is supplemented with qualitative analysis of the researchers' field notes and the students' artifacts. Our findings highlight the inherent intertextual nature of children’s argumentation and a critical role the teacher played in eliciting and steering the children’s argumentation construction through strategic instructional conversations (especially accountable talk). Our findings also revealed teacher-led children’s intertextual argumentation as a powerful heuristic process and tool to enrich students’ learning. The paper concludes some classroom argumentation teaching practices based on the research findings.

Experts, peers, or celebrities? The role of different social endorsers on children's fruit choice

This study investigates whether the source providing nutritional information matters for children's choice of fruit over candy. We conducted a between-subject experimental study with children (6–11 years; Mage = 8.20; N = 340). Children watched an audiovisual cartoon with nutritional messages provided by experts (expert condition), by celebrities (celebrity condition), or by typical consumers (peer condition). Additionally, we included a control group in which children were not exposed to any cartoon. As the dependent variable, we measured children's fruit choice over candy. As a mediator, measuring message processing we included children's argument awareness. Children's age was included as a moderator. The results indicate that the experimental conditions were equally effective in creating argument awareness for healthy eating compared to the control group. Children's argument awareness was generally rather low, and it did not influence children's fruit choice over candy. Nevertheless, there was a direct effect of the expert condition on children's fruit choice, pointing to an internalized “expert heuristic”. No moderating effects of children's age were present. Our study indicates that using experts to present nutritional information within narrative media content is a potentially successful strategy to create argument awareness for healthy food and to impact children's selection of healthy food whereas peer and celebrity social endorsers are not.

Children's reasoning with peers in cooperative and competitive contexts.

We report two studies that demonstrate how five- and seven-year-olds adapt their production of arguments to either a cooperative or a competitive context. Two games elicited agreements from peer dyads about placing animals on either of two halves of a playing field owned by either child. Children had to produce arguments to justify these decisions. Played in a competitive context that encouraged placing animals on one's own half, children's arguments showed a bias that was the result of withholding known arguments. In a cooperative context, children produced not only more arguments, but also more 'two-sided' arguments. Also, seven-year-olds demonstrated a more frequent and strategic use of arguments that specifically refuted decisions that would favour their peers. The results suggest that cooperative contexts provide a more motivating context for children to produce arguments. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Reasoning is a social skill that allows people to reach joint decisions. Preschoolers give reasons for their proposals in their peer conversations. By adolescence, children use sophisticated arguments (e.g., refutations and rebuttals). What the present study adds? Cooperation offers a more motivating context for children's argument production. Seven-year-olds are more strategic than five-year-olds in their reasoning with peers. Children's reasoning with others becomes more sophisticated after preschool years.

Conflict resolution in the context of Early Childhood Bilingual Education: towards a multicultural development

This article discusses how young children learn to deal with conflicts from a multicultural standpoint. The present work is based on the view that, in a world of multiple demands and perspectives, children learn to deal with life in a variety of ways that will enable them to choose who they will become. The main underlying concepts of this article include: multiculturalism, linked to multilingualism and multimodality, as well as collaborative intervention for the creation of zones of proximal development and children's oral argumentation. The data consists of a multimodally transcribed episode of a snack time situation among two-year-old children, showing the multicultural development of kids in their way of dealing with conflict resolution.

Delivering pediatric HIV care in resource-limited settings

If children are to be protected from HIV, the expansion of PMTCT programs must be complemented by increased provision of paediatric treatment. This is expensive, yet there are humanitarian, equity and children's rights arguments to justify the prioritization of treating HIV-infected children. In the context of limited budgets, inefficiencies cost lives, either through lower coverage or less effective services. With the goal of informing the design and expansion of efficient paediatric treatment programs able to utilize to greatest effect the available resources allocated to the treatment of HIV-infected children, this article reviews what is known about cost drivers in paediatric HIV interventions, and makes suggestions for improving efficiency in paediatric HIV programming. High-impact interventions known to deliver disproportional returns on investment are highlighted and targeted for immediate scale-up. Progress will carry a cost - increased funding, as well as additional data on intervention costs and outcomes, will be required if universal access of HIV-infected children to treatment is to be achieved and sustained.

Engagement in philosophical dialogue facilitates children’s reasoning about subjectivity.

Theories of learning have long emphasized the essential role of social factors in the development of early reasoning abilities. More recently, it has been proposed that the presentation of conflicting perspectives may facilitate young children's understanding of knowledge claims as potentially subjective-one of many possible representations of the world. This development in epistemological understanding has been proposed to be an important determinant of academic performance and is highly correlated with the ability to understand and produce sound argumentation in adolescents and adults. In a longitudinal study of children 7-8 years old, we assessed the effects of a 3-month philosophy class designed to engage children in dialogic interaction with peers. We examined the influence of this intervention on children's epistemological understanding and argumentation skills in 4 domains of knowledge: aesthetic, value, social, and physical. Participation in dialogic interaction in an elementary school classroom improved children's ability to construct their own and opposing arguments across domains and facilitated reasoning about the subjectivity of knowledge in the value domain.

Toward a Shared Metaphoric Meaning in Children's Discourse: The Role of Argumentation

Toward a Shared Metaphoric Meaning in Children's Discourse: The Role of Argumentation The text deals with the phenomenon of understanding and interpreting metaphoric expressions in children. Of the many metaphoric figures, one type was selected: the ‘so-called’ psychological-physical metaphors that illuminate a psychological experience by appealing to an event in the physical domain. The data consist of children's discussions in pairs, in which they make a joint interpretation of metaphors including a dual-function adjective, e.g., a hard person, a sweet person, an empty person. A hundred and forty-four dialogues between peer dyads were recorded from three age groups (48 dialogues from each group): 6;6-7;6, 8;6-9;6, and 10;6-11;6. The children's task was to prepare an interpretation of metaphorical expressions for two television quiz shows, one for peers and one for young preschoolers. The research design was balanced for age, gender, and order of metaphoric interpretation in the two experimental variants. Following Quignard's model (2005), we analyzed children's argumentation as a particular case of dialogical problem solving, whereby children had to understand the metaphoric meaning and convey it to the potential addressee. The results show an interesting dynamic in the argumentative orientation of the pro and the contra type, depending on the age of interlocutors. The frequency of metaphoric interpretations in opposition to those presented by the partner decreases with the children's age, but the frequency of compound proposals with the use of the partner's contribution increases. For the younger addressee, children most frequently interpret metaphors as descriptions of magical situations.

Argumentação e desenvolvimento do pensamento reflexivo

O objetivo central do presente artigo é oferecer uma perspectiva a partir da qual as relações entre argumentação e reflexão podem ser investigadas. O argumento central proposto é que os mesmos mecanismos semiótico-dialógicos que constituem a argumentação (justificação de pontos de vista, consideração de objeções e reação a elementos contrários) são igualmente efetivos em deslocar o pensamento do indivíduo para um plano reflexivo (metacognitivo). A produção destas ações discursivas reorienta o pensamento do indivíduo do objeto sobre o qual argumenta para o exame das bases e limites de suas próprias concepções sobre aquele objeto. Tal reorientação institui o pensamento do próprio indivíduo como objeto de reflexão. Na segunda parte do artigo, uma análise de fragmentos de argumentação produzida por crianças em sala de aula ilustra a forma como a perspective proposta pode ser utilizada na investigação do desenvolvimento de processos auto-regulados de reflexão.

Children's argument writing, interest and self-efficacy: an intervention study

The purpose of this study was to examine how a combination of motivational and instructional variables can be best utilized in an intervention program to improve students' emotional and cognitive experiences during argument writing. One hundred and seventy-seven students at the junior intermediate level participated. The study involved a pre-test, intervention, post-test design with two forms of intervention. The basic program given to all students included instructions on argument writing and incorporated strong motivational features. The second form of intervention provided students with an additional motivational component consisting of extended collaborative writing activities. In addition, we examined the relation between students' general interest in writing and their genre-specific liking and self-efficacy of writing. More specifically, we focused on the relation between interest and self-efficacy, two motivational factors relevant to writing: an Interest, Liking and Self-efficacy Questionnaire was administered pre- and post-intervention. The intervention programs resulted in a significant overall improvement in the quality of children's argument writing. The collaborative writing experience was especially effective for boys. The responses to the questionnaires indicated that children's genre-specific liking and self-efficacy of writing are closely associated and that both of these factors are also associated with their general interest in writing.

Visualizing the emergent structure of children's mathematical argument

AbstractMathematics educators suggest that students of all ages need to participate in productive forms of mathematical argument (NCTM, 2000). Accordingly, we developed two complementary frameworks for analyzing the emergence of mathematical argumentation in one second‐grade classroom. Children attempted to resolve contesting claims about the “space covered” by three different‐looking rectangles of equal area measure. Our first analysis renders the topology of the semantic structure of the classroom conversation as a directed graph. The graph affords clear “at a glance” visualization of how various senses of mathematics—as imagined, as performed, and as historically rooted—were interrelated. The graph represents the emergence and intercoordination between conceptual and procedural knowledge in the ebb and flow of classroom conversation. The graph has not just descriptive, but also predictive power: Interconnectedness among the nodes of the graph representing the first 40 min of conversation predicted the structure of recall in the final ten minutes by children who had played little overt role in the conversation up to that point. The second, complementary framework draws upon Goffman's expanded repertoire of roles in speech to demonstrate how the teacher orchestrated this classroom conversation to establish coherent argument. In this second analysis, we establish how the teacher mediated between the everyday talk of her students and the discourse of mathematics. Her revoicing of student talk created interstices for identity and participation in the formation of the argument. Together, the two forms of analysis illuminate the emergence of mathematical argument at two levels: as collective structure and concurrently, as individual activity.

Everyday and Mathematical Language in Children's Argumentation about Proof

In this paper I conceptualize the relationship between the children's actively constructed argument, and the formal conventions of the culture of schooling and mathematics which the teacher introduces, in ways which move beyond the dichotomous view of reasoning as either everyday or scientific-mathematical. The analysis draws on Vygotsky's (1986) notion of spontaneous (informal) and scientific (formal, schooled) learning as well as, on Halliday (1975, 1978) and Pimm's (1987) view of register.

On the Logical Integrity of Children's Arguments

The purpose of this study was to investigate properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcripts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principal findings were that (a) children's arguments are filled with seemingly vague refemng expressions, (b) the arguments sometimes do not contain explicit conclusions, and (c) most arguments are missing--or seem to be missing-explicit warrants to authorize conclusions. The missing or obliquely identified information, however, usually is given in the text or preceding discussion or is a commonplace from everyday life and readily inferable by actively cooperative participants in the discussion. Children seldom back their arguments by appealing to general principles, except when the foundation for the argument is disputed or seems confusing. At a more general level, we conclude that it is possible to give a coherent account of children's arguments within the framework of informal deductivism augmented with speech act theory.

Negotiating principles of entitlement in sibling property disputes.

Sibling property disputes were observed in 40 families, each with a 2- and a 4-year-old child, to study the application of principles of entitlement. Conflict outcomes, parent support, and justifying arguments were each analyzed in disputes involving ownership, possession, sharing, and property damage. Ownership and possession each influenced the conduct and outcomes of disputes, with ownership taking precedence over possession in children's arguments and in dispute outcomes. Parents did not clearly support either principle on its own and were as likely to argue in terms of possession as ownership rights. Parents supported children's sharing and prohibited property damage, but conflict outcomes upheld these principles only when parents intervened. Analyses revealed the strong influence of young children who argued, with increasing differentiation and sophistication, for principles of entitlement that were not strongly endorsed by their parents.

On Giving Reasons in Verbal Disputes: The Development of Justifying

INTRODUCTION In the past seven years an interest in the discourse structure of children's spontaneous verbal disputes has added new detailed information to the study of children's argumentation (Dunn & Munn, 1987; Eisenberg, 1992; Maynard, 1985; Phinney, 1986; Willbrand & Rieke, 1986). Taking advantage of analytic techniques used in discourse analysis, the purpose of this study is to examine the development of children's argumentation by analyzing the discourse contexts of justifications. By analyzing justifications, the study addresses issues in the development of children's argumentation and interpersonal conflict. Previous Studies of Children's Disputes Conflicts between children have been of interest to developmental psychologists as social and cognitive phenomena for many years; one of the first studies conducted in the early 1930s (Dawe, 1934) investigated the relation between conflicts and social adjustment. Piaget stressed the importance of conflict in cognitive and moral development (Piaget, 1932), while Vygotsky stressed internalization of social interaction and the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), which would also include interpersonal conflicts, as important to cognitive and communicative development. In recent years, however, technological advancements in recording interaction and theoretical advancements in the study of language have created a new sensitivity to the complexities of children's conflicts. Several studies (Eisenberg, 1992; Hay, 1984; Maynard, 1985; Phinney, 1986; Shantz, 1987) have described the nature of arguments among young children in the following ways: arguments are rare and very short events when compared to the rest of children's interactions during a typical day, lasting less than ten turns 90% of the time; the first moves in an argument have a tremendous effect on the rest of the interaction; similarly, the topic of dispute has a tremendous effect on the interaction, and topics change in the course of development from an initial focus on object control to include issues of behavioral control or ideational opposition (differences in beliefs, likes, rules of interaction, moral or conventional transgressions). Dunn & Munn (1987) provided the first study of children's first uses of justifications in spontaneous verbal disputes. In a longitudinal study of 43 children observed at home at 18, 24, and 36 months, they found that justifications were present but very rare at 18 months, occurring in only 4% of all the disputes with mothers. They noted a significant increase in the use of the justifications between 24 and 36 months. The justifications were most likely to occur in disputes over object rights or control; these same types of disputes were also the ones which elicited the most anger and distress at 18 and 24 months. In a study of 4-year-olds' conflicts with their mothers, Eisenberg (1992) found that the children used justifications in 36% of their disputes, and these disputes concerned plans and intentions and also expressed more anger and distress. The study also found that both children and adults used justifications more when they initiated the conflict, and were more likely to use justifications if the other did so previously. Communication theorists and argumentation theorists have also investigated children's verbal disputes, both elicited and spontaneous, in order to broaden the concept of argumentation and reason giving by using analytic techniques from discourse analysis and to examine the development of argumentation (Benoit, 1983; Haslett, 1983; O'Keefe & Benoit, 1982, Willbrand & Rieke, 1986). These studies have found both developmental differences in strategies for resolving disputes (Benoit, 1983) and both developmental and stylistic/personality differences in the use of more mature reasoning strategies in verbal disputes (Haslett, 1983; Willbrand & Rieke, 1986). These studies have focused on explicating the relation between argumentation and interpersonal verbal disputes, trying to understand the relation between reason giving (an argument people make) and interpersonal conflict (an argument people have) (O'Keefe, 1982). …

Arguments and relationships within the family: Differences in young children's disputes with mother and sibling.

This study examined whether children's arguments differ in disputes with mother and with sibling as well as how arguments used in family interaction relate to later assessment of social understanding. Fifty children (age 33 months) were observed interacting with the mother and sibling in 2 visits in the child's home, and family conversation was recorded and subsequently transcribed. Results showed correlations between partners'arguments in conflict within dyads, but children's argument with their mothers was not related to that used when in dispute with their siblings. Children's use of argument with sibling was also predictive of sociocognitive performance assessed 7 months later

The Collaborative Development of Power in Children's Arguments

(1992). The Collaborative Development of Power in Children's Arguments. Argumentation and Advocacy: Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 77-88.

How children start arguments

ABSTRACTPrevious research on children's arguments has neglected their initial phases, particularly how they arise out of children's ongoing practical activities. This paper examines how any utterance or activity can be opposed, the concept of opposition being at the center of any definition of argument. However, once opposition has occurred, it can be treated in a variety of ways, and a full-blown argument or dispute is only one possible and contingent outcome. Children analyze others's moves not only verbally, but nonverbally as well. Thus, bodily actions and presupposition are necessary components in the analysis of how arguments are started. Nonverbal oppositional moves may be at the base of semantically constructed disputes. When opposition occurs, it is to be taken to imply the violation of some rule or value. The meaning of that rule or value relative to children's culture is taken to have to do not with its content, but its usage in promoting a local social organization. (Conversational analysis, child language, social organization, presupposition, dispute genres, American English [middle class, Caucasian])