Improving argumentation by teaching errors

By Alistair Jones

SMU Office of Research Governance & Administration – The old adage about learning from our mistakes takes on new meaning in recent research by Sarah Shi Hui Wong, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Singapore Management University (SMU). Her study finds that when students act in the role of a tutor, their skill at argumentative reasoning is boosted if they generate weak but plausible arguments for their intended audience to spot.

Professor Wong's paper, Learning by Teaching with Deliberate Errors Promotes Argumentative Reasoning, has featured as the cover article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Educational Psychology. 

It was also selected as the Editor's Choice by the American Psychological Association, a discretionary honour bestowed on papers that offer an unusually large potential impact to the field and/or the elevation of an important future direction for science.

This is impressive acknowledgement, especially since the research was led by a single scholar. Professor Wong says she is "deeply honoured".

"This work hinges on both lines of my ongoing research on deliberate erring and learning-by-teaching, respectively. It shows for the first time how both techniques can be thoughtfully integrated via what I have now called 'learning by misteaching' to boost argumentative reasoning.

"I should point out that, traditionally, students can benefit from spotting and correcting others’ errors. But my lab has found that having students deliberately make their own errors improves their learning and transfer even more," Professor Wong says.

Argumentation quality

So, what is argumentative reasoning?

"Argumentative reasoning is a sophisticated skill that involves constructing and evaluating arguments," Professor Wong says. "Since the time of the ancient philosophers, this skill has been considered as the key to learning to think critically. Even today, developing students’ argumentative reasoning is a major educational goal around the world. 

"Developing good argumentative reasoning is not spontaneous but often requires substantial training. In part, this is due to misconceptions that good arguments are simply about 'lining up facts' when, actually, argumentation inherently involves the potential for debate and credible opposition. 

"Skilled arguers recognise this and address both sides of an issue in their arguments. But less skilled arguers tend to engage in 'my-side bias', generating one-sided arguments that focus only on their favoured position and ignore the opposing side."

Professor Wong notes that even when people are trained on argumentation strategies, they must also acquire a deep understanding of the topic to argue well. Her study reinforces that teaching, including misteaching, can be a productive activity for gaining improved understanding. 

"Teaching others stimulates generative processes that benefit the tutor’s own learning more than egocentric activities," she says. "We have further found that teaching others is a powerful way to improve higher order learning outcomes."

For the project, student participants were trained on argumentation strategies and given a dual-position, controversial text to study using one of three learning methods: note-taking, correct teaching, or misteaching. Both the teaching and misteaching groups wrote a verbatim script about the topic, exactly as they would orate a lecture. This proved to be the more effective learning tool.

"Intention matters in learning. Students typically write study notes for themselves with the goal of preparing to be tested. In contrast, teaching scripts are written for a target audience with the goal of helping them learn," Professor Wong says.

"When we examined the students’ study notes versus teaching scripts, we found that their teaching scripts contained more elaborations in generating inferences or analogies that went beyond the material. In turn, this increased generative processing accounted for why tutors outperformed notetakers on holistic argumentation quality."

Integrative strategies

How was it possible to measure better argumentative reasoning?

"On the argumentative reasoning test, participants wrote a conclusion about the debate topic they had earlier studied via note-taking, correct teaching, or misteaching," Professor Wong says. 

"Trained raters scored the holistic quality of participants’ arguments at the macro level, and the number of times that participants used integrative strategies such as weighing and design claims at the micro level. On both fronts, [scripted] tutors outperformed notetakers on the argumentative reasoning test, with additional benefits from misteaching than correct teaching."

What is an integrative argument and why is it desirable?

"Arguments are integrative when they consider both sides of an issue, rather than only one side, to reach an overall conclusion," Professor Wong says. "Good arguments are able to resist and defeat opposing arguments. When we simply ignore or dismiss opposing ideas, our arguments are weaker because they have not been shown to withstand challenge.

"Instead, by integrating arguments for and against an issue, our arguments would ultimately be stronger in reconciling different views, providing us with better clarity to decide on optimal actions and achieve our goal."

Teachable moments

In an interesting twist, misteaching participants were unaware that it had benefited them, even after experiencing its effects on their test performance. 

"Many studies have consistently found that students often do not have high metacognitive knowledge or awareness of what works best for their learning," Professor Wong says. "This could be a result of their relying on inaccurate or misleading cues when judging how well they have learnt.

"Experience alone may not be enough to increase students’ knowledge about effective learning strategies. Instead, students may benefit from being taught not only what to learn, but also how to learn." 

And is there a wider application of the research findings for educators generally?

"More broadly, these findings raise questions about what it means to teach effectively. Understandably, teachers often strive to teach only correct information and may be anxious about disrupting their students’ learning or appearing incompetent when they impart wrong information," Professor Wong says. 

"Yet, studies have found that intentionally making errors in one’s teaching for student spotting does not harm student learning, and could in fact improve it. In this way, deliberate errors in misteaching could be a stepping stone for teachers to embrace errors as teachable moments rather than debilitating events." 

For Professor Wong's future research, one significant direction relates to translating and scaling her lab findings to inform educational policy-making processes and decisions at the societal level. 

"Concurrently, we will continue to chase after the deeper mechanisms of these educational methods, in order to optimise their prototyping, implementation and chance for success in the real world," she says.

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