Is exposure to dialogic instruction associated with improvements in middle-school students’ argumentative writing and knowledge of argument concepts? Evidence from propensity score analyses

Observational and experimental studies demonstrate that young children possess an inchoate understanding of argumentation. Nevertheless, they often fail to adequately justify their viewpoints in their oral and written argumentation. The current study investigated whether exposure to a dialogic instruction intervention during the Covid pandemic was associated with improvements in middle-school students’ argumentative writing and their conceptual understanding of argumentative concepts. In total, 802 students in the 6th (34.4%), 7th (34.4%), and 8th grades (31.2%) participated in the study. Instructional exposure was operationalized using four indicators (attendance, instructional mode, teacher planning engagement, and student participation in teacher-assigned activities) and analyzed using Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) to identify distinct exposure groups. Missing data were managed through multiple imputation, and Propensity Score Analysis (PSA) was used to estimate associations between exposure profiles and student outcomes. We found that students in the highest exposure group outperformed their peers in lower exposure groups, suggesting that high exposure to the dialogic intervention was generally associated with practically significant improvements in the quality of middle-school students’ written arguments and their knowledge of concepts that represent argumentative discourse.