アムステルダムの国際議論学会

来年，オランダのアムステルダムで開催される議論学の国際学会に，プロポーザルを送っていたのですが，ショックなことに落選しました。どうやら学会の関心に近いものから採択されたらしいのですが，なんでやねん！
http://cf.hum.uva.nl/issa/

記録しておくために，プロポーザルの全文を載せておきます。あーあ。

Measuring an individual difference in informal discussion ability with interview method

Measuring individual differences in informal reasoning is an important task for researchers who are involved in higher education, professional training, and informal reasoning theories. Especially, individual abilities for collective reasoning (so called, discussion) is difficult to conceptualize and measure in general. This research reports an on-going attempt to measure informal discussion skills with an interview method. The interview procedure is basically comprised of three questions about such social problems as juvenile crime and mobile phone: (1) what do you think causes juvenile violence?, (2) suppose there is someone who has different ideas from yours and he/she is going to argue against you, what do you think he/she is going to say against your reasons? and (3) can you refute his/her arguments? In this study, answers to the third question are utilized for measuring the discussion ability. The answers were evaluated by the numbers of perspectives used in their refutations. One perspective is whether the refutation includes why his/her argument is reasonable. The other perspective is whether the refutation includes why the supposed opponent’s idea is not reasonable. The numbers of the perspectives were individually quantified as the refutation score for the following analyses. In addition to this procedure, discussion sessions were employed to validate the refutation score. Participants were twenty undergraduates who belonged to debating clubs and thirty-two graduate students who had not taken any special debate training. The debaters are theoretically assumed as high-skilled participants and the graduate students are as low-skilled. They all participated in two experimental sessions. Firstly, Two twenty-five minutes discussion sessions were held in dyads. Secondly, they were interviewed with the manner explained above one by one. As a result, it was found that the way of refuting observed in the interview was reflected in his/her effectiveness in the previous discussion sessions. The high-skilled participants were scored higher than the counterparts and they also demonstrated effective processes in discussion sessions. Specifically, three characteristic features were found as follows: (1) they compared reasons from both affirmative and negative perspectives, (2) they responded to all the critical points in the discussions, and (3) they discussed critically to find their grounds in arguments which were not obvious at the start of the discussions yet. It is considered that these features supported effective informal discussions held by high-skilled participants. In contrast, most of the low-skilled participants did not demonstrate such processes in the discussion sessions. The results indicate the refutation score is a possible index for individual discussion ability, although more investigations are required.