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Goal: The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students' engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. Method: We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students' arguments according to Toulmin's elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. Findings: Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes.

The challenge of creating more inclusive public schools addressing the needs of the 21st century Knowledge Society is a major one. In this paper, we focus on inclusion as a dialogical process to be adopted and developed by teachers and students alike in any classroom. The idea of inclusive dialogic teaching is explained and operationalised in an inclusive dialogic curriculum focusing on cultural literacy learning dispositions. In this study, which is part of a multi-country European project, eight Spanish and Portuguese secondary school teachers and their students participated in eight sessions performing dialogic lesson plans. Teachers attended two professional development sessions, one at the beginning of the project and another one later on. Classroom discourse data from sessions #3 and #8 were collected and analyzed using a pre-constructed coding scheme. The findings show a slight improvement in dialogicity from session #3 to session #8 with a persisting resistance from teachers to be more cumulative in their discourse. These findings confirm previous work showing that dialogic teaching is acquired gradually, and even when there are changes in teachers' stance being more inclusive and inviting towards students, these changes do not necessarily represent a radical shift in the teaching methods towards being more student-centered.

Over the past 20 years, a broad and diverse research literature has emerged to address how students learn to argue through dialogue in educational contexts. However, the variety of approaches used to study this phenomenon makes it challenging to find coherence in what may otherwise seem to be disparate fields of study. In this integrative review, we propose looking at how learning to argue (LTA) has been operationalized thus far in educational research, focusing on how different scholars have framed and fostered argumentative dialogue, assessed its gains, and applied it in different learning contexts. In total, 143 studies from the broad literature on educational dialogue and argumentation were analysed, including all educational levels (from primary to university). The following patterns for studying how dialogue fosters LTA emerged: whole-class 'low structure' framing with a goal of dialogue, small-group 'high structure' framing with varied argumentative goals, and studies with one-to-one dialectic framing with a goal of persuasive deliberation. The affordances and limitations of these different instructional approaches to LTA research and practice are discussed. We conclude with a discussion of complementarity of the approaches that emerged from our analysis in terms of the pedagogical methods and conditions that promote productive and/or constructive classroom interactions.

Cultural literacy, as a set of values and dispositions developed through dialogue and constructive argumentation with people representing different cultural identities, is an essential skillset of a twenty-first-century citizen in any part of today's world. Especially within the current European landscape of continuous immigration and change, the fluidity and rhetoricity of identity construction require a notion of citizenship education that can adapt to this dynamic process. Moreover, the practical aspects of being a citizen in its authentic, global, democratic sense are not sufficiently emphasized within current curricula. In this paper, we present an innovative citizenship education curriculum based on dialogic, argumentative and cultural literacy skills, which addresses this gap through proposing discursive practices of cultural identity construction at a collaborative level (small group or whole class) inspired by wordless texts (picture books and animated films) on core civic cultural values such as tolerance, empathy and inclusion. Through applying a design-based research methodology with teachers from three education levels and four European countries, we conclude that dialogic lesson plans aiming at the development of cultural literacy dispositions can act as an innovative and adaptive citizenship education curriculum in diverse contexts.

Extensive research has focused on analysing teacher-student discourse within whole-class dialogic interactions, and several descriptive tools have been proposed so far to cover possible variations. However, what still remains unanswered is what types of teacher questions are 'better' than others. To answer this question, I propose a pragmatic analysis of teacher-student interaction based on the criteria of authenticity and dialogicity. The analysis focuses on two types of dialogue moves, 'information-seeking' and 'inquiry' moves and their subtypes, as assessed on the basis of their degree of dialogicity, emerging from the dialogue sequence in which the moves are situated. The discussion focuses on how such a normative analysis of interaction can help teachers guide more productive dialogues with their students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty adolescents (7th and 10th grades) participated in a ten-session argumentation programme as part of which they produced dialogues and written texts on the topic of whether or not Portugal should receive more refugees. Applying social identity and intergroup threat theories as frameworks, causes for flight and seeking asylum were felt to be the most important reasons, expressed by 80% of adolescent students, for welcoming refugees. While students' concern regarding the ascribed characteristics of refugees was of minor importance, both age groups reported a significant concern with the decline of the host group's socio-economic conditions. Also, despite the fact that all students were exposed to information and facts that could inform their views, their discourse still contained argumentative reasoning fallacies such as hasty generalisation and appeal to fear. Based on these findings, we recommend explicit work in education on engaging students in cultural literacy practices.

This integrative literature review takes up the ongoing discussion about the place of mixed methods designs in educational research. We focus on studies that investigate the role of argumentation in inquiry-based learning, either as a means for enhancing inquiry (argument-based inquiry) or as a learning outcome (inquiry-based argument). We argue that this field of research offers a perfect example of the ways in which a paradigm and its research questions call for mixed-methods designs. We then present an integrative review to explore patterns and identify gaps in the literature, asking: (1) How frequently and in what ways are mixed methods used in the field? (2) What rationales are driving the use of mixed methods? and (3) To what extent is the potential of mixed methods research being realized in the field?. For readers studying argumentation in inquiry-based instruction, we hope to open up a critical dialogue about aims and methodologies in the field. For readers interested in mixed-methods designs we hope to offer a case study of how to build a rationale from within a discipline for leveraging the range of mixed methodologies to study a problem. We conclude with recommendations for further research.

This article examines three commonly used pedagogical methods, namely the Socratic method of inquiry, collaborative problem solving, and debate-based deliberation, establishing the relationship of each one of these methods with the strategic promotion of argumentative reasoning, as a commonplace objective and means of inquiry-based educational praxis. Building on the idea that critical thinking has an aporetic element that is missing from contemporary educational positions, I argue that a more normative, structured approach to critical inquiry pedagogical strategies is necessary for teachers to better understand their practice and educational researchers to analyse pedagogical dialogue. For this, I model classroom discourse using four types of argumentation dialogues based on the research of the Canadian philosopher Douglas Walton. Examples of classroom discourse transcripts in different disciplinary areas are analysed according to these types, which correspond to information-seeking, discovery, inquiry and persuasion dialogues. In all these types of dialogue, the aporia is defined as a starting point reflected in both the dialogue's main goal and participants' aims. The side benefits of each one of the four types of dialogue when implemented as pedagogical strategies are also discussed. Finally, suggestions for empowering teachers in identifying and implementing different potentially argumentative dialogues as part of their pedagogical strategies kit are presented.

The phenomenon of endorsing people for their professional skills on LinkedIn is more and more evident, and it grows along with the expansion of this broadly used professional networking website. This article focuses on the ease with which people endorse others and also accept endorsements and the potential impact of this action on people's knowledge authority profile. An online survey was answered by 120 professionals from all over the world. The findings reveal some considerations regarding the interrelation between the act of endorsement and how personal, rather than epistemic, its criteria are. Implications for recruiters and educators are discussed.

Our aim was to explore the influence of mobile learning on students' acquisition of conceptual knowledge of business communication, as well as on the development of their communication skills. We compared the performance of three groups of students according to the pedagogical approach that we used with them: a mobile learning group, a conventional group, and a control group. Our findings suggest that a mobile learning intervention leads to an improvement in student performance in a formal assessment and that it will also have a positive impact on learning outcomes.

In this article, we describe a project in which undergraduate business seniors at a university in the Arabian Gulf created or evaluated the chapters of an iBook as part of their final course in business communication. Students were surveyed throughout the project, and they also participated in a focus group discussion at the end. The aim was to evaluate their experience with learning from a peer-generated iBook and to identify any motivating factors behind it. The study showed that incorporating mobile learning into the business communication classroom was highly meaningful for the students involved for a range of different reasons.

While user-centred design and user experience are given much attention in the e-learning design field, no research has been found on how users are actually represented in the discussions during the design of online courses. In this paper we identify how and when end-users' experience--be they students or tutors--emerges in designers' discussions during their meetings in well-established open universities. More precisely, we observed 15 design meetings of two design teams during the development of specific online courses. Designers' discourse was analysed on the basis of six dimensions regarding relevant actors, contents and strategies (purposes) of user experience anticipation. Results show the emergence of a solution-oriented anticipatory discourse in form of scenarios regarding how learners and tutors will react to the course and the proposed activities. Moreover, this discourse is related to an emergent type of users-based expertise, translated as the capacity of some designers to empathise with the end-users more than other designers do. The participation of designers with this type of expertise in e-learning design teams emerges as relevant for the decisions related to the course activities, interface or overall experience. Further research is invited towards this direction. Further discussion on this article can be found in "Being in the users' shoes: Is there maybe another way?" (DOI: 10.1111/bjet.12104).

The need to enhance argument skills through education has become increasingly evident during the past 20 years. This need has resulted in an ongoing discussion that focuses on students' and teachers' argumentation and its support. However, apart from the extended competence-based discourse, no clear and homogeneous definition exists for argumentative competence and its constituent skills. To respond to this deficiency, we conducted an integrative literature review focusing on the methods of argument analysis and assessment that have been proposed thus far in the field of education. Specifically, we constructed an interpretative framework to organize the information contained in 97 reviewed studies in a coherent and meaningful way. The main result of the framework's application is the emergence of three levels of argumentative competence: metacognitive, metastrategic, and epistemological competence. We consider this result the beginning of further research on the psycho-pedagogical nature of argument skills and their manifestation as competent performance.

Prescriptive stage models have been found insufficient to describe the dynamic aspects of designing, especially in interdisciplinary e-learning design teams. There is a growing need for a systematic empirical analysis of team design processes that offer deeper and more detailed insights into instructional design (ID) than general models can offer. In this paper we present findings from two case studies of team design meetings involved in the development of fully online courses at two well-established European Distance Universities. We applied an activity-based approach to an extended verbal protocol dataset. This method proved to be adequate to describe the emerging team design process by taking into account both cognitive and social aspects of team activity in this specific context. Our findings provide evidence that design is more than problem solving, mainly because the design process is strongly related to the communication process in a team. Some useful patterns of designing emerge, which shed light on the still implicit nature of ID performed by teams. We conclude by presenting guidelines for team designing in the complex field of e-learning.