Why Do Students Struggle to Evaluate Information (Arguments)?

What is it about?

Being able to comprehend, evaluate, and produce arguments is a critical aspect of academic literacy. Argumentation skills are particularly important for successful performance in college. For this reason, we expect students to learn these skills in high school. Yet, many children who graduate from high school still struggle to comprehend, evaluate and produce arguments. Both high school and college students have difficulty in evaluating the quality of simple arguments. We examined whether skilled and less-skilled evaluators differ in how they evaluate arguments under two different evaluative tasks (Quality Judgments & Agreement Judgments). The findings are interesting and informative.

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Why is it important?

Reading well is not equivalent to evaluating (argumentative text) well. Evaluating written text, at least, simple argumentative texts of the claim-reason kind, require students to represent the most important information, precisely, to utilize the semantic cues in the arguments, appropriately, and to rely on the logical connections between the arguments' claims and reasons, under all evaluative-task conditions. No wonder, many college and high school students struggle to evaluate arguments. The current study findings provide insight into potential reasons why some students struggle to evaluate arguments while others do it effortlessly, and have implications on argumentation research and on educational practices.

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