Across three related studies at the University of Potsdam, Prof. Dr. Winnie-Karen Giera and her colleagues examine this challenge from three revealing angles. One asks whether structured debating can make students’ written arguments more persuasive. Another looks inside the digital writing process, examining how students use planning tools while composing. The third studies what happens when debate is combined with explicit strategy instruction. Together, they present argumentation as a process involving conversation, planning, self-regulation, revision, and the ability to move flexibly between ideas.

Argumentative writing is unusually demanding. In conversation, another person supplies the opposing viewpoint. In an essay, students often have to imagine that person. They must decide what they believe, identify reasons, anticipate objections, select examples, organize competing claims, and guide a reader toward a conclusion. At the same time, they are managing vocabulary, sentences, spelling, punctuation, and coherence. What looks like one school task is actually many tasks happening together.

The researchers’ wider Fair Debating and Written Argumentation project explored whether some of that burden could be made more manageable by connecting oral and written argument. Debate is particularly interesting because its structure resembles a pro-and-con essay. Students open a case, exchange arguments and counterarguments, and finish by drawing their reasoning together. More importantly, debate gives the opposing viewpoint a human voice. Instead of inventing an objection, students hear one and have to answer it.

The QASA pilot study zoomed in closely on this possibility. It examined 18 essays written by nine ninth-grade students in non-academic-track schools, comparing texts produced before and after six 90-minute debate sessions. The researchers did more than simply ask whether the later essays sounded better. They mapped their argumentative structures, examining units of reasoning and the relationships between them, while also rating persuasiveness.

The sample was small, so the findings are promising rather than definitive. Even so, six of the nine students improved their overall persuasiveness rating. After debate training, the essays contained more argumentative units and more complex structures. Students began using examples where none had appeared in their initial texts, and attacks on opposing positions became more frequent. Debate seemed capable of leaving fingerprints on the written page. Students were beginning to build arguments in more developed ways.

Persuasive writing, however, also depends on what happens while a text is being produced. A second study therefore shifted attention from the finished essay to students’ digital writing behaviour. It examined time spent actively writing, time spent in a digital planning space, and how often students switched between their plan and the developing text.

The results produced an important distinction. Simply spending longer on a plan was not a strong predictor of a better essay. Active writing time and movement between planning and composing mattered more. Students who switched more frequently between the writing plan and text editor tended to produce higher-quality texts. The researchers connect this movement with cognitive flexibility. Effective writers can return to ideas, reconsider structure, transfer notes, and adjust direction as the text develops.

That finding complicates familiar advice to “plan more.” The value of a planning tool lies in whether ideas can travel from plan to text and whether the writer can move between the two productively when an argument needs reshaping.

Differences between school tracks make this especially significant. Students in lower academic tracks spent somewhat more time planning, yet generally produced lower-quality texts than those in higher academic tracks. The researchers suggest that students with less previous experience may rely more heavily on external scaffolding. Students can invest substantial time and still need explicit guidance about transforming planning into effective writing.

This is where the third study brings the strands together. It examined a combined approach involving structured debate and Self-Regulated Strategy Development, or SRSD. The study involved 357 ninth-grade students from six German schools across higher and lower academic tracks. Students encountered both debating and SRSD-based writing instruction, with each intervention comprising six 90-minute sessions and with the order varied between groups.

SRSD makes the hidden work of writing more explicit. Students learn strategies for planning, organizing, monitoring, and revising rather than being handed a topic and expected to discover an effective process themselves. Debate supplies the social experience of argument. Together, the approaches address a difficulty visible across all three studies: students need both ideas worth arguing about and practical ways of controlling those ideas once they reach the page.

The question was now larger than whether debate could help nine students write more persuasively. With hundreds of students involved, the researchers could ask whether these connected forms of instruction improved argumentative writing more broadly, whether their order mattered, and whether students entering the classroom with different educational opportunities benefited in the same way. The answers reveal why this research is as much about educational opportunity as it is about better essays.

The larger study found encouraging evidence that this combination worked. Students’ argumentative writing improved following the interventions, with gains appearing in assessments of overall text quality and language use. Debate itself also appeared capable of supporting written development, reinforcing the smaller QASA study’s finding that oral argumentation can transfer to the page. Across the three papers, a consistent picture emerges: learning to write an argument is not confined to the moment when students sit down and begin typing.

Why might speaking make such a difference? During a debate, weaknesses in reasoning become difficult to ignore. A claim that sounds convincing in a student’s head may suddenly require evidence when an opponent challenges it. A counterargument demands a response. An example can make an abstract point concrete. Students experience argument as something constructed for another person rather than as a collection of statements assembled to satisfy a teacher.

The QASA analysis makes this process particularly visible. After debate training, students were doing more than producing longer or more elaborate texts. Their arguments showed changes in structure, including greater use of supporting relationships, examples, and challenges to opposing positions. The researchers found that the appearance of examples was associated with the intervention, while attacks on opposing arguments were more closely related to ratings of coherence and persuasiveness. This suggests that sophisticated argumentation involves more than accumulating reasons. Writers must understand how those reasons relate to one another and to competing claims.

The digital-writing study adds another piece to the puzzle. If debate helps students generate and test argumentative relationships, those relationships still have to be managed during composition. Students who moved productively between their digital plan and their developing text tended to write better essays. Planning therefore appears less like a preliminary stage that ends when writing begins and more like a resource that can be revisited throughout composition.

This has practical implications for teaching. Telling students to make a plan may accomplish little if they regard that plan as paperwork to complete before the “real” writing starts. They may need to be shown how to return to it, transfer ideas, reorganize arguments, and alter it as their thinking develops. Cognitive flexibility means being able to adapt rather than rigidly following an initial route.

SRSD provides explicit support for precisely this kind of self-regulation. Students learn ways to manage planning, composition and revision while gradually taking greater responsibility for the process themselves. Combined with debate, it creates an interesting progression. Students can first experience argument as an exchange between people, then learn strategies for recreating the logic of that exchange independently in writing. Yet the larger study also found that the sequence was flexible. There was no significant overall difference between students who encountered debate before SRSD and those who received SRSD before debate.

That is useful for classrooms because it means teachers do not necessarily need to follow one fixed formula. Debate can serve as an engaging route into a topic before writing, but explicit strategy instruction can also prepare students to participate more deliberately in argument. What seems to matter is the connection between the modes rather than insisting that one must always precede the other.

Perhaps the most consequential findings concern students in lower academic tracks. In the German school context examined by the researchers, students in higher academic tracks typically begin learning pro-and-con argumentative writing earlier. By ninth grade, they may therefore have experience that lower-track students have not yet had, even though argumentative writing will matter for the latter group’s final examinations.

Across the studies, those differences appear in revealing ways. The digital-writing research found that lower-track students spent more time planning and writing while nevertheless producing lower-quality texts. The QASA pilot, meanwhile, showed that students with no previous formal experience of the pro-and-con essay could develop more persuasive and structurally complex arguments following debate instruction. Most significantly, the larger intervention study found especially visible gains among lower-track students.

The implication is that differences in performance must be interpreted alongside differences in opportunity. A student who has had less exposure to a genre may need stronger scaffolding, not lower expectations. Debate, digital planning tools and explicit writing strategies offer different forms of that support. One provides authentic argumentative interaction, another helps externalize and reorganize thinking, and another teaches students how to regulate the complicated process of writing.

There are important reasons for caution. The QASA study involved only nine students, making its detailed findings exploratory. In the broader project, only 44 students could be identified consistently across all four measurement points, limiting the researchers’ ability to trace individual development over the entire period. The project also ran during the COVID-19 pandemic, so some lessons had to take place online. Larger studies, longer-term tracking and research involving regular classroom teachers could establish how well these approaches transfer into everyday teaching.

Still, viewed together, the three studies offer a valuable shift in perspective. Better argumentative writing can begin when students speak, encounter disagreement, visualize the structure of ideas, move between plans and drafts, and learn strategies for controlling a demanding task.

Prof. Dr. Winnie-Karen Giera and her colleagues ultimately present argumentation as something students learn by doing across different modes. That matters beyond examinations. Young people live in a world overflowing with claims competing for their attention. Learning to examine those claims, respond to opposing positions, revise ideas and construct a reasoned case is part of learning how to participate thoughtfully in society. Helping students write better arguments is therefore also about helping them become more deliberate thinkers.