Question: What controversial topics did the authors choose?
Evidence: As a main field of interest in the current study, we chose controversies in education. One distinguishing feature of educational topics is their breadth of sub-topics and points of view, as they attract researchers, practitioners, parents, students, or policy-makers. We assume that this diversity leads to the linguistic variability of the education topics and thus represents a challenge for NLP. In a cooperation with researchers from the German Institute for International Educational Research we identified the following current controversial topics in education in English-speaking countries: (1) homeschooling, (2) public versus private schools, (3) redshirting — intentionally delaying the entry of an age-eligible child into kindergarten, allowing their child more time to mature emotionally and physically BIBREF51 , (4) prayer in schools — whether prayer in schools should be allowed and taken as a part of education or banned completely, (5) single-sex education — single-sex classes (males and females separate) versus mixed-sex classes (“co-ed”), and (6) mainstreaming — including children with special needs into regular classes.
Since we were also interested in whether argumentation differs across registers, we included four different registers — namely (1) user comments to newswire articles or to blog posts, (2) posts in discussion forums (forum posts), (3) blog posts, and (4) newswire articles. Throughout this work, we will refer to each article, blog post, comment, or forum posts as a document. This variety of sources covers mainly user-generated content except newswire articles which are written by professionals and undergo an editing procedure by the publisher. Since many publishers also host blog-like sections on their portals, we consider as blog posts all content that is hosted on personal blogs or clearly belong to a blog category within a newswire portal.
In cooperation with researchers from the German Institute for International Educational Research, we identified the following current controversial topics in education in English-speaking countries: (1) homeschooling; (2) public versus private schools; (3) redshirting—intentionally delaying the entry of an age-eligible child into kindergarten, allowing their child more time to mature emotionally and physically (Huang and Invernizzi 2013); (4) prayer in schools—whether prayer in schools should be allowed and taken as a part of education or banned completely; (5) single-sex education—single-sex classes (boys and girls separate) versus mixed-sex classes (“co-ed”); and (6) mainstreaming—including children with special needs into regular classes.
Answer: (1) homeschooling; (2) public versus private schools; (3) redshirting—intentionally delaying the entry of an age-eligible child into kindergarten, allowing their child more time to mature emotionally and physically (Huang and Invernizzi 2013); (4) prayer in schools—whether prayer in schools should be allowed and taken as a part of education or banned completely; (5) single-sex education—single-sex classes (boys and girls separate) versus mixed-sex classes (“co-ed”); and (6) mainstreaming—including children with special needs into regular classes.