ABSTRACT
Personally-seeded discussions support learning and collaboration through an activity structure that elicits, shares, and contrasts students’ own ideas to engage them in the discourse of science argumentation and inquiry. The context for this study is an online thermal equilibrium inquiry lab for eighth grade students. The students use a special interface to build principles to describe the data they collect in the lab portion of the project. These principles become the seed comments for the online discussion. The software sorts the students into discussion groups with students who have built different principles so that each discussion group represents multiple perspectives. Students then follow a set of guidelines to critique each other’s principles. This paper explores the efficacy of this approach in supporting argumentation structure using a coding scheme developed by Osborne, Erduran, and Simon (2002). The Toulmin-based hierarchy rates arguments according to level of structural sophistication in terms of first order elements including Claims, Grounds, and Rebuttals.
