Evidence of Effectiveness for AJA Strategy to Argumentative Skills Development in Engineering Students

Development of argumentative skills is fundamental for Engineering students, allowing them to identify assumptions and build conclusions about observed phenomena. In this paper we report results from a study involving 41 Engineering students, who practice and apply the Affirmation - Justification - Application of Laws and Principles strategy (AJA) to build an argument about and specific Engineering system. Students’ argumentative skills were measured with a validated questionnaire before (pre-evaluation) and after (post-evaluation) students knew and practiced AJA strategy. Results show a significant improvement in two of the three components of the argumentative students’ skills: Justification and Application of Laws and Principles, but in the Affirmation component, results did not show significant improvement. Evaluations were written as questions where students were asked to explain the behavior of an engineering system in two different contexts: physics context and math context. Physics context questions demanded from students, besides a correct application of AJA strategy, a correct application of physics Newton's laws to explain the movement of a system. Math context questions require from students a good knowledge of graphical interpretation of derivatives in the context of a motion to interpret certain conditions of movement in a specific system. Results show no difference between evaluation in physics and math contexts.