Explicit representations of reasoning to support deliberation within groups

In practice, the reasoning that underpins problem solving and decision making is rarely performed by an individual in isolation from others but involves a communicative exchanges between participants in a community that can range in size from two to many thousands. Dialogue theories describe patterns in dialogues comprising many dialectical exchanges and often advance deliberation, the kind of dialogue that ensues when participants actively seek to understand all views and collectively arrive at the rationally optimal solution. This study reports on the use of argument maps for structuring reasoning by groups of secondary students. The study aimed to discover whether different maps facilitate deliberation and enhance understanding of the issues by providing an explicit representation of reasoning. An explicit representation of reasoning is a model that encapsulates all relevant claims, evidence, statutes and principles pertinent to an issue. Schemes that have been used to provide explicit representations of reasoning include the Issue Based Information System (IBIS) map, variants of the Toulmin argument structure (TAS) and other knowledge representation schemes used for intelligent computational systems. Results indicate that an explicit representation of reasoning facilitates a depth of understanding of complex issues and there is some indication that the deliberative quality of discussions is enhanced depending on the level of abstraction of the map. Copyright © 2008 COSI.