Abstract

When students are learning collaboratively, they may engage in a variety of different discourses. Students who are trying to understand a text may elaborate on each other’s statements about what the text means. Students solving mathematics problems may give each other answers or state a series of steps to follow. Another prominent form of discourse is argumentation, which involves taking positions, making claims, and giving reasons and evidence for claims that are made. Often, although not always, argumentation will involve some disagreement and participants will take and defend different positions. In this chapter, we discuss learning through a specific form of this discourse, which we call collaborative argumentation.