We present a computational exploration of argument critique writing by young
students. Middle school students were asked to criticize an argument presented
in the prompt, focusing on identifying and explaining the reasoning flaws. This
task resembles an established college-level argument critique task. Lexical and
discourse features that utilize detailed domain knowledge to identify critiques
exist for the college task but do not perform well on the young students data.
Instead, transformer-based architecture (e.g., BERT) fine-tuned on a large
corpus of critique essays from the college task performs much better (over 20%
improvement in F1 score). Analysis of the performance of various configurations
of the system suggests that while children's writing does not exhibit the
standard discourse structure of an argumentative essay, it does share basic
local sequential structures with the more mature writers.

本研究探讨了中学生的论证批判写作，发现基于 BERT 模型的架构完成大学层次的论证批判任务效果要比基于领域知识的词汇和语篇特征的模型更好，且分析表明尽管孩子的写作没有成熟的论证文章的标准话语结构，却与成熟的作家分享基本的本地序列结构。