This paper’s goal is to examine developmental pathways undertaken by college students engaged in an argument curriculum. In particular, we examine how students internalize emerging semiotic regulators. Consistent with a sociogenetic tradition, we approach development as the process of internalization of socially shared forms of semiotic regulation giving form to the architecture of higher mental functions. We use an argument curriculum inspired by the Critical Debate Model (MDC) to create a systematic argumentative setting that serve as a tool for the development of students’ reflective thinking. The argumentative setting is based on five competitive debate cycles. In each cycle, students are divided into 3 groups and the groups rotate in taking the roles of protagonists, antagonists and judges/researchers. Within this setting, students are stimulated to rationally exchange points of view, evaluate arguments, challenge positions and produce counter-arguments. We take argumentation to be a discursive-cognitive activity and a situated action of rational dispute of divergent points of view between a protagonist (who propose the matter of discussion) and an antagonist (who doubts or challenges the protagonist). We closely examine a group (12 students) with the goal of investigating if/how the socially shared semiotic tools available through the curriculum would be internalized by the students. The results indicate that there are different developmental paths for competitive semiotic regulator (relates to pragmatical or rethorical dimensions) and collaborative semiotic regulators (relates to shared knowledge construction). We observed that goal orientation, group discussion and argument addressivity is related to whether competitive or collaborative regulation is taking place, in a debate context competitive regulators (orient towards strategic and anticipatory uses of argument) are more present in the semester’s beginning, and only after the group had mastered these regulators more collaborative regulation starts to take place (discussions oriented to individual doubts and collective construction of knowledge).
