Supporting undergraduate students' acquisition of academic argumentation strategies through computer conferencing

This research grows out of work on the importance of argumentation in developing students' critical abilities. It focuses attention on how students argue in computermediated conferences as opposed to traditional written assignments investigating the way in which argumentation is realised within the relatively new context of computer conferencing which allows extended written discussions to take place over a period of weeks. Such text-based asynchronous conferencing is typically characterised by features of both spoken and written modes.