ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses interrelations between argumentation and inquiry, understanding them as epistemic practices. In particular, we explore features of inquiry learning environments that promote argumentation. Both practices address epistemic goals about how knowledge claims are built, evaluated, and justified, seeking the development of epistemic cognition: the ability to construct, evaluate, and use knowledge. Drawing from the AIR model of epistemic cognition, four critical components of the design of inquiry environments that promote argumentation are characterized: (1) epistemic Aims: creating, evaluating, and critiquing epistemic products, such as arguments; (2) epistemic Ideals: generating epistemic criteria, appropriating disciplinary standards, and appropriating citizenship values; (3) Reliable epistemic processes: generating and selecting data to become evidence, interpreting evidence in order to identify patterns and propose explanations, and communicating and persuading; as well as (4) instructional context: scaffolding epistemic performances, engagement in dialogic teaching, and engagement in projects involving authentic tasks. This review about the relationships between inquiry learning and argumentation suggests, first, that there are interactions and synergies between them, rather than clear-cut effects of one on the other; second, the review points toward a constellation of components of inquiry learning environments that promote argumentation in combination, rather than to the effect of isolated factors.
