Elisabetta Montanari

One of the main objectives of the European integration project Horizon 2020 is to promote inclusive, innovative and reflective societies. The members of these societies come from different cultural backgrounds but they are able to dialogue about social and personal issues with an open and respectful attitude, to reflect critically on their own ideas and beliefs and to revise them where needed. Hence, in order to help students to become globally competent citizens, it acquires a great relevance to enhance those educational strategies which are apt to foster among young people analytical and critical skills, since these enable students to scrutinize and appraise the worth and the reliability of any material, in particular their own and other’s ideas and beliefs. As a first and fundamental step of this appraisal, the validity of such ideas and beliefs should be evaluated on the basis of their internal consistency and their consistency with evidence, knowledge and experience. The aim of my research work is, exactly, to design and test an argumentative intervention to use as a mechanism for the development of high school students’ reasoning consistency.

Elisabetta Montanari, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia

Commentary by Adriana Rosa Ramos, Universidade Nova de Lisboa