Socratic strategies and devil's advocacy in synchronous CMC debate

Within a synchronous computer‐mediated discussion, teachers used a prescriptive framework of Socratic interventions together with dialogue moves which challenged students to justify their opinions or which presented a ‘devil's advocate’ line of counter‐argument. This paper examines the effectiveness of different teacher strategies and presents examples of those strategies in use. The research found that, although teachers used relatively few ‘counter‐argument’ moves, these moves could be particularly successful in encouraging students to develop and defend a line of argument.