“I know people who were depressed, and now they are not." Students' strategies in classroom argumentative interactions with teachers and classmates

This study sets out to investigate the students’ strategies in classroom argumentative discussions with their teacher and with their classmates. The data corpus is constituted by 16 video-recorded lessons of two courses – one at the undergraduate level and one at the graduate level – in Developmental Psychology. The two courses were selected according to the following criteria: similar numbers of students, similar disciplinary domain, both courses are taught by the same teacher in the English language. The results indicate that the undergraduate students advance fewer arguments than the graduate students, and when they do so, in most cases, their arguments are based on practical knowledge and previous personal experience. On the other hand, the graduate students more frequently advance arguments that refer to scientific notions and theories strictly or somehow related to the discipline taught in the course.