A central task of education is seen to be the preparation of students for lifelong learning. The competencies of argumentation are an important part of this because these competencies are necessary both to understand and participate in discourse. The concept of argumentation shows many connections to basic research in the field of cognitive psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, especially to research programmes of "inductive and deductive logical reasoning", "causal reasoning", "abductive reasoning", "Bayes reasoning", "adaptive thinking", or "intuitive deciding" (Gigerenzer, 2000). Reinmann-Rothmeier & Mandl (1998) found in a Delphi-study that skills for evaluating knowledge and information represent the most important basic skills within a knowledge society. Shapiro and Hughes (1996) saw such skills as part of information literacy. |