Argumentive reasoning skills are featured in the new K–12 Common Standards (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010), yet with little said about their nature or how to instill them. Distinguishing reasoning skills from writing skills, we report on a multiyear intervention that used electronically conducted dialogues on social issues as the medium to develop argumentive reasoning skills in two cohorts of young adolescents. Intervention groups demonstrated transfer of the dialogic activity to two individual essays on new topics; argument quality for these groups exceeded that of comparison groups who participated in an intervention involving the more face-valid activity of extensive essay writing practice, along with whole-class discussion. The intervention group also demonstrated greater awareness of the relevance of evidence to argument. The dialogic method thus appears to be a viable one for developing cognitive skills that the comparison-group data show do not routinely develop during this age period.

Significant individual variation is observed in how people reason as jurors At the satisficing end of a continuum we identify, the juror draws on evidence selectively to construct a single story of what happened, with no acknowledgment of discrepant evidence or alternative possibilities A contrasting theory-evidence coordination mode of processing entails construction of multiple theories (story-verdict constellations) that are evaluated against the evidence and against alternatives Individual differences influence task outcome, the satisficing mode being associated with more extreme verdict choices and very high certainty