Accelerating secondary students' learning progression in scientific argumentation using artificial intelligence: An educator's guide and online course

Developing argumentation skills is key for secondary students' societal participation, particularly in socioscientific discussions. Multiple learning progressions describe steps in the development and provide the base for effective instruction. Using artificial intelligence (AI) has been suggested to improve the implementation of instruction through its emerging capabilities, including providing feedback, acting like a tutor, or serving as an argumentation partner. However, examples demonstrating how AI could specifically support students in their learning progressions are lacking. This article addresses this gap by providing guidance for using AI to improve learning progression-based argumentation instruction. The guidance includes example AI prompts that integrate pedagogical content knowledge. We have developed a free online course that complements this article, offering practice tasks, explanatory videos, and AI prompts to facilitate further implementation. This course is accessible at https://open.hpi.de/courses/chatgpt2025 and includes a custom AI argumentation trainer [https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6856795be5788191872fcf33b1cbebf2-argumentation-trainer].