Historical reasoning, as a disciplinary literacy, aims to develop higher-order thinking in addition to depth of historical knowledge beyond the textbook and memorization of facts. It teaches students to use information across multiple sources to contextualize and corroborate historical accounts, constructing an informed yet critical interpretation…

Argumentation can contribute significantly to content area learning. Recent research has raised questions about the effects of discussion (deliberation) goals versus persuasion (disputation) goals on reasoning and learning. This is the first study to compare the effects of these writing goals on individual writing to learn. Grade 7 and 8 students…