Thanks for your query, Victor!

We have developed a two-week exercise to teach law students to make arguments concerning a legal issue called the “Duty to Aid”. Students read a hypothetical scenario involving “Ms. Nice”, a crossing guard and “Mr. Walker”, an adult who habitually crosses against the light. One morning, Ms. Nice warned Mr. Walker not to cross the street against the light, as she always did, but he ignored her as usual.
Ms. Nice saw a car about to turn the corner, risking injury to Mr. Walker; however, she did NOT stop the car. Was Ms. Nice liable for Mr. Walker’s injuries???

The exercise provides step-by-step instructions for making legal arguments about the scenario, including citing legal rules and making arguments by analogy to cases. Each step is illustrated using argument diagrams. The argument diagrams are arranged incrementally, so that students learn gradually to extend and responds to the arguments.

Participants engage in computer-supported peer review of other students’ argument diagrams and their resulting written arguments.

Applying the technique in a medical domain could be very interesting. We haven’t tried it but, perhaps, the technique could be adapted to a medical scenario presenting ethical issues….

Thanks for your question, Karen.

Our use of argument diagrams in science makes salient the problem solving / argument nature of science. Students come to see the place of a student as contributing to a live, argumentative process. This frequently raises interest in science, which broadens participation in the sense of increasing the total number of students interested in science.

Separately, this kind of view is normally taught slowly through mentorship, and we know that science mentors are very unevenly distributed. By providing access to this process/argument view of science to large lab classes, we do hope to broaden participation in the sense of diversifying the types of students who participate.

Thanks, Brian. This argument-diagramming support is designed to work as a scaffold. Your idea of gradually withdrawing the support is interesting, but we have not tried it. Instead, as mentioned in response to Victor, in the two-week legal exercise the argument diagramming activities are arranged incrementally, so that students learn gradually to extend and respond to the arguments. Then, the students are asked to put the gradually introduced components together in constructing and writing an argument about a new but related problem.

Thanks for the compliment, Joseph! We are beginning to apply related argument diagramming techniques with public school tenth graders and their teachers for use in connection with their English language arts coursework. The aim is to help them understand and apply Common Core concepts such as “argument,” “claim,” “counterclaim,” “evidence,” and “reasoning.” The students focus on diagramming authors’ arguments in two essays on the topic of “happiness” and then diagram their own arguments comparing the authors’ positions.