As part of their general education requirements, many incoming college students are required to enroll in composition courses that explore various college-level writing practices. Some students, including those who are part of Generation Z, struggle because they may be unfamiliar with academically-dense language, lack real-world experience using argument-based concepts, or have had fewer opportunities to discuss such concepts in depth. To address these student struggles at a public university, Robert Moses' framework (Moses & Cobb, 2001) was used in two first-year composition course lessons to determine how this scaffolded, student-centered pedagogical approach would impact students' comprehension and application of several key argument concepts: ethos, pathos, logos, and synthesis. The first Moses'-based lesson established the approach's impact from pre- to post-test, while the second Moses'-based lesson was compared to a more teacher-centered lesson. The drastic gains from pre- to post-test in both of the Moses'-based lessons, which also surpassed gains from the teacher-centered lesson's post-test scores, revealed the clear impact of Moses' framework: When given real-world experience (via Steps 0, 1, and 6), a chance to discuss, draw, and represent argument concepts (via Steps 2, 3, and 5), and scaffolded explanations of academic language (via Step 4), students' test performance improved greatly. These results highlight that if Gen Z students are to blossom into confident members of the academic community, they need to be actively involved in their own learning process, and for their interests, values, and cultural knowledge to bear on lesson content, a hallmark of Moses' framework.