There is compelling evidence that arguing with peers in educational contexts fosters students' content knowledge and argumentation skills. Indeed, curricula have already been developed that, through tailored support for peer argumentation, promote both content knowledge and argumentation skills simultaneously. However, we do not yet know how to…

Peer argumentation, especially the discussion of contrary points of view, has experimentally been found to be effective in promoting science content knowledge, but how this occurs is still unknown. The available explanations are insufficient because they do not account for the evidence showing that gains in content knowledge are unrelated to group…