Argument maps as a proxy for critical thinking development: A Lab for undergraduate students. [Zenodo Dataset]

Argumentative skills are crucial for any individual at the personal and professional levels. In recent decades, there has been an increasing concern about the weak undergraduates' skills and considerable difficulty in reworking and expressing one's own reflection on a topic. In turn, this has implications for being a critical thinker, able to express an original point of view. Tailored interventions in Higher Education could constitute a powerful approach to promote argumentative skills and extend these skills to professional and personal life. In this regard, argument maps (AM) could prove to be a valuable support to the visualization process of arguments. They don’t just create associations between concepts, but trace the logical relationships between different statements, allowing you to track the reasoning chain and understand it better. We conducted an experimental study to investigate how a path with AM could support students in increasing the level of text comprehension (CoT) competence, in terms of identifying the elements of an argumentative text, and critical thinking (CT), in terms of reconstructing meaning and building their own reflection. Our preliminary descriptive analysis suggested the positivity of the role of AM in increasing students’ CoT and CT proficiency levels This Zenodo record follows the full analysis process with R (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/ ) composed of the following datasets and script: 1. Comprehension of Text and AMs Results - ExpAM.xlsx 2. Critical Thinking Results - CriThink.xlsx 3. Argumentative skills in Forum - ExpForum.xlsx 4. Selfassessment Results - Dataset_Quest.xlsx 5. Data for Correlation and Regression - Dataset_CorRegr.xlsx 6. Descriptive Statistics - Preliminary Analysis.R 7. Inferential Statistics - Correlation and Regression.R Any comments or improvements are welcome!