An Evaluation of Japanese Elementary Students’ Understanding of the Criteria for Rebuttals in Argumentation

Our purpose is to identify the Japanese six grade (aged 11-12 years) elementary school students’ understanding of the criteria for quality of rebuttals before they learn on argumentation. The criteria for high-quality rebuttals include explicitly pointing out the errors in other people's statements (pointing out) and explaining reasons as to why the statements are incorrect (reasons). We conducted the evaluation task to identify students’ understanding of the criteria for quality of rebuttals. The results revealed that many students recognized rebuttals include reasons as high-quality rebuttals, but did not recognize rebuttals include pointing out as high-quality rebuttals.