Insights into the analysis of elaborative discourse activities and their impact on argumentative reasoning

• Applicant: Dr. Elisabeth Paus
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2013 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 245197166

The pivotal role of argumentative discourse for the development of argumentative reasoning seems well documented. However, a more thorough analysis on the content level is needed to identify specific interrelated communicative actions that foster the ability to argue and to develop an integrative perspective towards a given topic. But what exactly are indicators of good dialogic argumentation? With the proposed project I aim at answering this research question by bringing together Prof. Kuhns and my own expertise through a research fellowship at Columbia University. While Prof. Kuhn has primarily focused on the investigation of the development of argumentative skills, the proposed project combines her and my research based on data that have been collected already: The present project will broaden the scope of research and theorizing on argumentation by aiming at the analysis of elaborative discourse features, like developing counterarguments, challenging the others perspective or providing explanations with regard to their impact on the processing of conflicting information. To attain the goals of the project, I plan to re-analyze a subset of data from a long-term study that have been collected in Prof. Kuhns lab. In particular, the interplay between discourse-partners will be investigated. Prof. Kuhn and her lab are skilled in the coding of processes to find out how previous communication influences further communicational moves. In this context, I can gain experience in the analysis of discourse data. Combining the competence of Prof. Kuhn and her lab members with my own knowledge about content analysis I will develop a coding scheme capturing the variety of communicational moves in argumentative discourse. Then, the quality of individual reasoning and the final solution based on discourse are considered as dependent measures to determine the interrelations between elaborative discourse activities and individual reasoning by applying structural equation modeling.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professorin Dr. Deanna Kuhn