According to the ?story model? a juror constructs an implicit mental model of a story telling what happened as the basis for the verdict choice. But the explicit justification of a verdict choice could take the form of a story (knowledge telling) or the form of a relational (knowledge-transforming) argument structure that brings together diverse, non-chronologically related pieces of evidence. The study investigates whether people tend towards knowledge telling or knowledge transforming, and whether use of these argument structure types are (...) related to skilled argument and epistemic understanding. A sample of people on jury duty chose and justified verdicts in two abridged cases. Participants tended to display the same argument structure and argument skill across cases. Those using knowledge-transforming structures were more successful at the juror argument skills task and had a higher level of epistemic understanding. The discussion suggests that jurors approach their task with an epistemic orientation towards knowledge telling or knowledge transforming. (shrink)

The present study has two goals: to explore elementary students’ understanding of evidence and the ways they deploy it to construct arguments, and to examine whether eliciting their concept of evidence during argumentation improves students’ evidence-based reasoning. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 4th and 6th graders in a public school in Mexico. We found significant differences between groups regarding the concept of evidence, with better performance in the older group. A positive correlation between the concept of evidence and the (...) quality of evidence-based reasoning was found. Also, three performance profiles were observed after eliciting the concept of evidence when grade was excluded as a factor. Results suggest that the concept of evidence plays an essential role in developing argumentative competence in pre-adolescence. (shrink)