The Students’ Argument Diagrams
The students’ argument diagrams contained few arguments (3–8 in number, five on average, including the statement of the thesis); they were generally very shallow (only arguments directly connected to the thesis) and were little elaborated (usually a single short proposition). The degree of correctness of argumenta- tive links (direction and polarity) was very variable from completely correct (four out of four) to not correct at all.
This argument diagram session was interrupted and abandoned before its planned end. One group of four students – the ‘hall’ group whose whole diagram had been deleted by intruders – became angry and shouted at other students on the opposite side of the room (‘It’s him, it’s him! Get out, get out!’). The situa- tion degenerated into threat of a fight. The teacher decided to stop the session, to take control over the class, and to abandon the planned subsequent textual synthesis phase: in several cases, there was no diagram produced that could have served as a basis for the text.
Analysis of the students’ diagrams from the log files enabled us to identify the intruders who had put insults in argument boxes of other groups then deleted their diagrams, as the three older boys of the class (see ‘par- ticipants’ above).
