Conference Agenda

This proposal reports a PRISMA systematic review examining how instructional designs in K–12 classrooms support students’ argumentation alongside social-emotional (SE) skills. Across educational psychology and learning sciences, argumentation is widely recognised as a powerful context for developing higher-order reasoning and academic language. At the same time, productive classroom argumentation relies on social-emotional capacities such as perspective-taking, empathy, sociability, and self-regulation, especially when learners engage with disagreement, uncertainty, and competing viewpoints. However, research has often treated argumentation and SE development as separate strands, leaving limited synthesis on how classroom designs integrate these dual aims and what evidence exists for SE outcomes.

Research Questions and Objectives

This review addresses two research questions:
(1) How have SE skills (e.g., empathy, perspective-taking, sociability, self-regulation) been conceptualised, operationalised, and examined in relation to students’ argumentation in K–12 classrooms?
(2) What instructional designs and classroom approaches have been used to support both argumentation and SE skills in K–12 settings?

The objectives are threefold:
(a) to synthesise how SE constructs are defined and positioned in empirical argumentation research;
(b) to map the range of instructional designs and tools used to foster argumentation with SE-relevant processes; and
(c) to identify gaps in measurement, design specificity, and evidence strength, offering priorities for future research and practice.

Conceptual and Theoretical Framework

The review is framed by two complementary theoretical lenses. First, a dialogic and socio-cultural view of learning treats argumentation as collaborative reasoning in which knowledge is constructed through interaction and responsiveness to others’ ideas. From this perspective, dialogic exchanges are not only vehicles for reasoning but also sites for developing dispositions and practices such as listening, respectfully challenging claims, and coordinating perspectives. Second, we conceptualise SE skills as both prerequisites for and potential outcomes of participation in argumentation-rich activities. We distinguish interindividual skills (empathy, perspective-taking, sociability) that support engagement with others’ positions, and intraindividual skills (self-regulation) that support sustained attention, emotional control, and reflective reasoning during complex tasks.

Building on these lenses and inductive coding of included studies, we propose a synthesis framework capturing three recurring instructional design features:
(1) Building a classroom Community of Practice through shared norms, stable participation structures, and collective responsibility for reasoning;
(2) Explicit instruction for cognitive and SE-related moves, such as using evidence, acknowledging counterarguments, listening actively, and managing emotions during disagreement;
(3) Structured dialogic processes, including routines and scaffolds that make turn-taking, peer critique, and perspective coordination more visible and learnable.
These features enable comparison across diverse pedagogical families such as dialogic/argumentation-centred instruction, project-based and inquiry-driven learning, and socially/culturally responsive approaches.

European / International Dimension

An international perspective is central to this review because argumentation and SE development are strongly shaped by cultural norms, language practices, and classroom participation expectations. The reviewed studies span multiple national contexts and include varied student populations (e.g., linguistically diverse learners, culturally plural classrooms), offering insights into how instructional designs travel across settings and how they are adapted. The synthesis highlights the role of digital tools and platforms—now increasingly common across European and global classrooms—in structuring participation, supporting asynchronous dialogue, and broadening student voice. By mapping evidence across countries and design traditions, the review aims to inform internationally relevant principles for designing argumentation-rich classrooms that also promote SE competencies, while identifying where stronger cross-cultural and longitudinal evidence is needed.

The concept of critical thinking, widely presented and discussed by the scientific community, tends to be polysemic; as a result, its definition may vary.

In the context of a broader study, which sought to assess how certain curricular and didactic provisions and dynamics promote or condition academic success in two subjects from different areas and originating from different knowledge structures - biology and history - it was found that, although teachers of both subjects placed the promotion of critical thinking as a central element of their work, the conception and implementation of this critical thinking varied according to the subject.

With this in mind, and considering that teachers placed the promotion of critical thinking at the centre of their teaching and pedagogical work, we sought to understand:

1. What are the perspectives and respective dynamics of teachers from different subjects in relation to critical thinking?

2. What are the students' perspectives on the contribution of the specific subject to the development of their critical thinking?

3. How can these different perspectives (and respective approaches) contribute to a reinterpretation of the concept of critical thinking?

The polysemic nature of the concept of critical thinking, on the one hand, opens the way to a wide range of theoretical and conceptual approaches to the subject, but, on the other hand, it also risks emptying these approaches of meaning. Furthermore, while some authors, such as Burbles and Berk, place greater value on epistemic adequacy, others, such as Lim, also consider the social and relational dimensions of thinking to be central. What these authors have in common is their focus on knowledge, the object of this thinking. In other words, critical thinking is not a skill that is learned in a vacuum, but something that is intrinsically related to knowledge.

In this context, the insights of Duarte, Fernandes, and Correia emerge. The authors, in their proposal on the dialectic of powerful thinking, distinguish between restricted and elaborated critical thinking. Their model focuses on the individual dimension of the act of thinking as well as the social (and sociocultural) dimension that constrains that same thinking (from the thinkable to the unthinkable). The authors' analysis of thinking, although based on assumptions related to psychology and neuroscience, has at its core an eminently social and relational perspective on how thinking structures are established and developed. In this sense, the concept of powerful thinking reflects the dialogical and intersubjective dynamics that influence our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world.

Duarte, Fernandes, and Correia's proposal consists of a dialectical model comprising different levels of reasoning structures, encompassing intellectual predispositions and integrated symbolic representations, which function according to an unbreakable logic of dialogue between reason and affections. They establish a preconventional level of thinking, which has an intrapersonal centring and can be directly related to what they define as restricted critical thinking; then, this critical thinking can become more elaborated when more abstract and decentralised thinking structures come into play - the conventional, with an interpersonal centring, and the postconventional, with an impersonal centring.

The ultimate goal of this proposal is, therefore, to present and discuss a model of differentiation of critical thinking that contains restricted and elaborated forms, and to frame the different perspectives previously presented in this model.