AbstractsEducation Research & Administration

Argumentation plays an important role in information sharing, deep learning and knowledge construction. However, because of the high dependency on qualified arguing peers, argumentative learning has only had limited applications in school contexts to date. Intelligent agents have been proposed as virtual peers in recent research and they exhibit many benefits for learning. Argumentation support systems have also been developed to support learning through human-human argumentation. Unfortunately these systems cannot conduct automated argumentations with human learners due to the difficulties in modeling human cognition. A gap exists between the needs of virtual arguing peers and the lack of computing systems that are able to conduct human−computer argumentation. This research aimed to fill the gap by designing computing models for automated argumentation, develop a learning system with virtual peers that can argue automatically and study argumentative learning with virtual peers.