Engaging Students in Informed Decision-Making
Students participating in an assignment based on the Collaborative Research Model ideally work together to agree upon a problem, to determine associated tasks, and to gather and generate perspectives in order to engage in reasoned, informed decision-making.
In a classroom where the instructor has introduced the problem for research, students should still be decision makers. In decision-making around their common problem—instructor-defined or group-generated—students should work together to address such tasks as:
- determining claims and counterclaims
- finding commonplaces
- developing shared definitions
- creating resource banks
- sharing and articulating perspectives
- engaging in exploration of claims and counterclaims
- evaluating results
Evidence of Decision-Making
Throughout the project, students work closely together, and the resulting collaborative deliberation through cooperative argumentation is an important late-stage phase that generates “evidence” of each student's deliberation process.
Whatever the forum, collaborative deliberation is the final step students take before creating a culminating deliverable, which may be:
- a paper or a report at the close of argumentation that articulates their current stance on the problem, or
- a self-critique of their participation in the cooperative argumentation forum.
A particularly effective form of collaborative deliberation is a cooperative debate, though cooperative argumentation may take other forms as well.
