Civic argumentation in the economic domain: Examining upper high school students’ arguments on socio-economic problems in a performance test by applying a domain-specific analytical framework

Abstract

Civic argumentation refers to societal problems that may affect various scientific disciplines. Societal problems are complex and their possible solutions controversial. Making informed and reasoned decisions on these problems requires domain-specific content knowledge and domain-specific argumentation skills. This study addresses argumentation on societal problems in the economic domain. It examines 159 high school students’ written arguments on two socio-economic problems in a performance test by applying a domain-specific analytical framework with quality criteria for argument structure and content and by using qualitative content analysis, cluster analysis and variance analysis. Our findings show that students’ argument structure did not substantially vary between the two test tasks, but their argument content did. Students tended to generate arguments with justifications that supported their own position, but seldom with justifications that qualified it. Of all arguments, a quarter were fully accurate, about half referred to scientific concepts and half included multiple perspectives. We identified three distinctive argument profiles regarding structure and content of argument quality. Moreover, the argument profile is a distinctive factor for students’ content knowledge. Our study gives insights into students’ written argumentation skills and content knowledge on socio-economic problems and offers a promising analytical framework for future research in this domain.