Socio-cognitive dynamics of knowledge building in the work of 9- and 10-year-olds

Abstract

This study examines four months of online discourse of 22 Grade 4 students engaged in efforts to advance their understanding of optics. Their work is part of a school-wide knowledge building initiative, the essence of which is giving students collective responsibility for idea improvement. This goal is supported by software-Knowledge Forum-designed to provide a public and collaborative space for continual improvement of ideas. A new analytic tool-inquiry threads-was developed to analyze the discourse used by these students as they worked in this environment. Data analyses focus on four knowledge building principles: idea improvement; real ideas, authentic problems (involving concrete/empirical and abstract/conceptual artifacts); community knowledge (knowledge constructed for the benefit of the community as a whole); and constructive use of authoritative sources. Results indicate that these young students generated theories and explanation-seeking questions, designed experiments to produce real-world empirical data to support their theories, located and introduced expert resources, revised ideas, and responded to problems and ideas that emerged as community knowledge

Technology-supported learning innovation in cultural contexts

“…It further requires a flexibly adaptive, open-ended instructional design in which "initial designers," teachers, and students can all contribute to the unfolding classroom processes (Schwartz et al 1999; see also Hannafin et al 1999;Sawyer 2004). Students are actively engaged in understanding and developing knowledge goals and deciding on what they need to do to achieve their goals (Zhang, Scardamalia, Lamon, Messina, & Reeve, 2007). They engage in deep work with ideas and work with their teacher to choose and evolve various activity structures, procedures, and tools in support of idea development, instead of the following through pre-specified, ritualized activity procedures (e.g., seatwork, presentation) in daily school life.…”

Developing Deep Understanding and Literacy while Addressing a Gender-Based Literacy Gap

“…We also considered results from related studies on growth in graphical representations (see Gan et al, present issue, for details) and idea advancement (Zhang et al, 2007). There were substantial increases in the amount of written text produced in Knowledge Forum over the four semesters, by both boys and girls.…”

“…They posed inquiry questions, proposed and developed theories, reported observations and results from experiments, narrated personal experiences, and justified their ideas. They also introduced new information from authoritative sources, commented on each other's notes to improve ideas, and reviewed and summarized their discussions to achieve a higher level of conceptualisation (see Zhang et al, 2007 for detailed analyses). Over the two years, the students wrote an average of 61.90 notes consisting of 3,867.55 tokens (total words) and 715.45 types (unique words, excluding misspellings), and read 46.50% (equivalent to a number of 566.84) of the notes of the community.…”

“…Pre--post--test results showed significant knowledge advances for individual students. Ratings of students' ideas in the Knowledge Building discourse indicated that they had moved from intuitive understanding of light to scientific accounts (see Zhang et al, 2007).…”

Elective Self-Care Course Emphasizing Critical Reasoning Principles

“…The course was designed to be student-centered 16 as the degree to which teachers relinquish responsibility and authority to students is central to students developing genuine agency. 8 Teachers' reluctance to entrust students with a high level of agency results in mixed approaches to teaching such as "cooperative learning," "self-regulated learning," and "guided discovery."…”