A study was conducted: (1) to determine the proportion of average 6th-grade students who, when given prompts, could produce an incipient form of dialectical reasoning; and (2) to test a unit of instruction developed to teach dialectical reasoning as an appropriate learning strategy for exploring public controversies. It was hypothesized that if dialectical reasoning were taught directly as a goal-specific strategy, the quality of instructed students' essays would exceed the quality of essays by non-instructed control students assisted by prompts. Participants were 45 middle-school students. The experimental curriculum contained six lessons distributed during social studies classes. Control subjects read and wrote mystery stories. Subjects were told to compose paragraphs stating their position, giving reasons for the position, giving reasons supporting the opposite position, and coming to a conclusion. Content analysis techniques were used to score the essays. Findings indicated that with minimal scaffolding on the assessment, most 6th-grade students could produce dialectical reasoning on a novel controversy about which they had some general knowledge. Minimal scaffolding at time of assessment had as much impact on production of dialectical reasoning as did explicit instruction designed according to principles generated by recent strategy instruction research. (RH)