Fig 4 - uploaded by Maria Chuy
Content may be subject to copyright.
Example of experiments run by children in senior kindergarten: measuring changes of length in leaves
Source publication
Knowledge Building provides a model of education for a knowledge age—a model of collective responsibility for idea improvement. This article provides two examples of getting started with the pedagogy and the technology, one from Senior Kinder-garten, with students working together to understand why leaves change color in the fall, and the other fro...
Similar publications
University education is more than the next level in the learning process; it is a critical component of human development worldwide. Buildings are very important to any University as they accommodate students, staff and equipment. Majority of building are several floors therefore, there is a need for elevators to take people from one flow to the ot...
This research presented analysing the students’ ability to use gerund and present participle at English Education Department of Sorong Muhammadiyah University and the factors affecting the students’ ability to use gerund and present participle. This research used descriptive method with the test and questionnaire instruments. The test consisted of...
Assessing elementary students' performance on number sense provides early predictors and support for interventions in teaching and learning number sense before children fall seriously behind in school. There is no study that concerns the differences between Hong Kong and Taiwan students' performance on the number sense three-tier test. The purposes...
It is apparent that technological changes are impacting the way Americans live and work. In this research, we investigate one of the impacts of the information age upon higher education, and examine Blackboard, a Web Enhanced Instruction (WEI) tool. In this research, we consider whether computer background and demographic differences among student...
Leveraging achievement data measured in the fall and spring of kindergarten through eighth grade for 840,000 students attending 8,800 public schools, we report novel evidence on how achievement and growth patterns differ between rural and nonrural schools. Rural students start kindergarten slightly ahead of nonrural students but fall behind by midd...
Citations
... In cMOOC, learners share and create their new ideas, solutions, theories and experiences individually or collaboratively. It is a process of knowledge growing (Downes, 2012b;Tarchi et al., 2013;Wang et al., 2017). The diversity and interaction of generative topics also have received growing research attention (Lin et al., 2022), but few empirical studies can give evidence for it and explain its mechanism. ...
A new mode of knowledge production, known as the ‘organic growth pattern’, has emerged within the online learning environment. It exhibits several unique features, such as iterative growth, fuelled by collective intelligence, fuzzy complexity, etc. It is more valuable and adaptable to support knowledge innovation within rapidly changing fields. To reveal its new evolutional production pattern and the interaction mechanism of different generative topics, We take a dual perspective of content and behaviour into consideration. A total of 1855 interactive data points were collected from a connectivist massive open online course. The study employed methods, such as latent Dirichlet allocation, content analysis and lag sequential analysis. Results showed that (1) the paths of knowledge innovation were complex and diverse. The process typically began with an ill‐structured question and was driven by collective contribution and cognitive conflict. (2) Knowledge production involved interactive evolution and collaborative growth of multiple generative topics. (3) The four stages of knowledge production were cyclic, with sense‐making acting as a bridge between way‐finding and innovation. Several implications of the findings are recommended to enhance the quality of knowledge growth, such as designing ill‐structured questions, providing discussion activities from easy to difficult, introducing relevant topics, taking advantage of various platforms and mobilizing learners' or participants' quality attention‐related behaviours.
... For example, the principles of real ideas, authentic problems and idea diversity prioritize students' lived experiences and ideas as funds of knowledge worthy of time, reflection, and careful investigation by the entire community. The teacher fosters a culture where racial diversity and individual differences are viewed as strengths and encourages students to bring their unique perspectives to enrich discussions and promote idea development (Zhang et al., 2011;Tarchi et al., 2013). In doing so, the teacher engages in a continuous process of restructuring of power dynamics in the classroom to realize the principles of epistemic agency, democratizing knowledge, and constructive use of authoritative sources. ...
... Previous studies mainly suggested that the Knowledge Building principles are interconnected and that implementing one principle tends to unlock the others (e.g., Scardamalia, 2002;Zhang et al., 2007). However, some other studies (e.g., Zhu et al., 2021;Law & Wong, 2003;Tarchi et al., 2013) suggested that several principles (e.g., authentic ideas and real problems, idea diversity) are easier for students and teachers to implement, while some are more challenging (e.g., symmetric knowledge advancement, rise above). Researchers have made varied efforts to group the twelve Knowledge Building principles; however, few studies have produced reliable subsystems or clusters of the principles (Chan & Chan, 2011). ...
Democratizing knowledge is about empowering all participants to be legitimate contributors to a group's shared goals and helping them take pride in advancing community knowledge. It is a crucial principle of Knowledge Building theory, the importance of which to developing more equitable learning environments is well recognized. However, what the indicators of democratizing knowledge are and how they manifest in pre-service teachers' Knowledge Building discourse are rarely studied topics; it is not clear how the indicators of democratizing knowledge correlate with students' adoption of Knowledge Building principles. This exploratory study addressed these issues by identifying the cognitive and social aspects of democratizing knowledge of 35 pre-service teachers' Knowledge Building discourse and analyzing the correlations between participants' adoption of Knowledge Building principles and different subcategories of democratizing knowledge. We identified greater frequencies of advancing ideas in their groups and being open to different ideas by participants, but lower frequencies of achieving a shared understanding or goals and rising above individual ideas to achieve synthesis by participants. Moderate to strong correlations between the indicators of democratizing knowledge and Knowledge Building principles were found. In addition, participants' notes that fell into the rise-above subcategory of democratizing knowledge were significantly fewer than notes of other subcategories. This study provides theoretical and practical implications concerning supporting and fostering learners' democratizing knowledge in Knowledge Building communities. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.
... This study suggests the connection between the pre-service teachers' adoption of Knowledge Building Principles in Knowledge Forum discourse and their group performance in designing lesson plans. Consistent with previous studies (e.g., Law & Wong, 2003;Tarchi et al., 2013), not all principles have the same level of accessibility to participants. Not surprisingly, both the analysis of student discourse and survey suggest that authentic ideas and real problems and idea diversity were frequently adopted by the students. ...
Knowledge Building is a socio-constructivist approach that aims to engage students in a knowledge-creation environment as early as possible to get them ready for the knowledge society. Rather than following fixed procedures or scripts, the twelve Knowledge Building Principles, such as collective responsibility, real ideas and authentic problems, and improvable ideas, have framed the Knowledge Building approach. These principles support teachers and students to identify and work on their needs to improve the coherence and explanatory power of their community knowledge. We hypothesize that the extent to which students adopt these principles influence their group Knowledge Building. We analyzed the online discourse, design artifacts, and reflection of 39 pre-service teachers. We found that the participants did well in contributing diverse ideas, engaging in Knowledge Building discourse, taking initiatives in their groups, and considering each other as legitimate contributors. However, they needed support to use authoritative sources, assess their discourse and knowledge status, rise above diverse ideas to achieve new syntheses, and make complementary contributions across teams. Principles such as improvable ideas, embedded and transformative assessment, democratizing knowledge and symmetric knowledge advancement tend to distinguish the high-performance groups from the medium- and low-performance groups. This study implies the importance of teachers and researchers to help students engage in productive Knowledge Building using the twelve Knowledge Building Principles.
... Students must also unlearn the game of schooling, including the desire to look smart by contributing fake theories (Bielaczyc, 2018) and relying on the teacher to validate their ideas (Milinovich & Ma, 2018). While past studies (e.g., Zhang et al., 2009;Tarchi et al., 2013) indicate that it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to foster a Knowledge Building culture in the classroom, recent work in the context of the Knowledge Building Innovation Network (Ma et al., 2019) in Ontario suggests that engaging educators in iterative design cycles of principle-based practices can support and even catalyze the development of teachers' efficacy in Knowledge Building. ...
Communities can be powerful drivers of learning and transformation. Knowledge Building communities aim to foster students' epistemic agency toward high levels of ownership over individual and collective learning-students come to enjoy relying on one another to advance their community knowledge. This case study examines pedagogical and technological designs for enculturating students into World 3, the world of ideas, theories, designs, and conceptual artifacts. From the first day of school, the teacher adopted a holistic approach toward principle-based designs, simultaneously engaging in multiple principles across multiple curricular areas. Furthermore, the process was catalyzed when she directly involved students in co-designing their Knowledge Building culture, including the norms of interaction, discourse structures, knowledge goals, and trajectory of knowledge advancement. Student and teacher reflections reinforce the notion that Knowledge Building is more than just an instructional framework: It is a philosophy-a way of living and being in contemporary knowledge societies.
... Scardamalia and Bereiter (2003) distinguish shallow and deep constructivism according to levels of responsibility and agency that students assume. Knowledge building requires that students engage in sociocognitive processes typically reserved for teachers; for example, setting goals, planning, monitoring work as it proceeds, and evaluating and improving idea coherence (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987;Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991, 2006Tarchi et al., 2013). Engaging students in the complex interactions of a knowledge building culture "captures the natural human tendency to play creatively with ideas, and expands it to the unnatural human capacity to exceed the boundaries of what is known and knowable -to exceed expectations rather than settle into routines" (Scardamalia, 2002, p. 78). ...
Interdisciplinary studies foster integration of ideas across disciplines. The knowledge building pedagogy, with its 12 principles and associated technology, Knowledge Forum ® , provides multifaceted support for linking ideas across disciplines and communities. This exploratory study aims to assess the extent to which elementary-school students within knowledge building communities work productively with ideas across content areas. Toward that end we examine "crisscrossing topics"-student use of concepts from multiple content areas-to explore the extent to which students think and theorize across disciplinary boundaries, use concepts found in curriculum guidelines at and beyond their grade level, and generate cross-topic notes that advance discourse. Results show that elementary school students engaged in knowledge building can extend knowledge boundaries and bring a considerable range of conceptual content to their work, resulting in productive discourse threads that contribute to community knowledge. Notes for Practice • Knowledge building aims to recreate education as a knowledge creating enterprise; as such, explorations are not circumscribed by assigned activities with predetermined structure and endpoint, but cross-disciplinary and grade-level boundaries. • A new analytic tool, crisscrossing topics, shows whether students think and theorize about topics in an interdisciplinary way, leading them to address concepts at and beyond their grade level. • The research reported indicates that integrating work across topics leads to more productive discourse threads.
... d even re-writing the KB principles to offer advice for teachers on how to use them. Taken together, Pieter discovered that the most powerful outcome of these experiences was watching his students continuously evolve their interpretation of the 12 KB principles. Table 1 shows a comparison of definitions from experts (Zhang et. al., 2011), teachers (Tarchi et. al., 2013), and Pieter's students. ...
One of the central goals of a classroom teacher is to foster student ownership over learning. Knowledge Building represents a principle-based approach to harnessing student voice to inform classroom practices, and in turn, foster students' epistemic agency for not only individual learning, but also collective learning. Student voice, thus, is critical to the intellectual life of a KB classroom. This paper explores how Pieter weaves student voice into the fabric of the everyday activities of his classroom. More specifically, Pieter reflects on how he has evolved his KB practices over the years to build student rapport while promoting student engagement and epistemic agency. Together, he and his students co-create classroom norms of interaction, develop shared success criteria, deconstruct the KB principles, and reflect on their collective learning journey. This paper concludes with a discussion of classroom practices that can help set the conditions for co-creating a Knowledge Building culture.
... Hands-on activities, such as brainstorming, chart paper, and sticky notes, were used in place of the KF. However, teachers used the scaffold supports from the KF to help students express their ideas (e.g., "My theory is…" "I need to understand" ( Tarchi et al., 2013). These scaffolds were written on paper and students used them to create their own ideas. ...
This study provides empirical findings that can be instrumental for educators and policy decision-makers to identify the effectiveness of Knowledge Building (KB) in K-12 schooling and inform current and future KB initiatives.
... 2 In the current operational conditions, many Communities of Learning-Kāhui Ako might not be ready for this yet, but it is worthwhile as a future aim. 3 See: www.knowledge-building.org. For examples of knowledge-building being used in classrooms, see the paper byTarchi et al. (2013) listed in the references above. 4 See: http://knowledgeforum.com. ...
... Several approaches have been proposed, for example, starting from "easier" principles and gradually expanding to others (Law & Wong, 2003;Tarchi et al., 2013), or integrating core KB principles with existing "activity structures" and carrying on iterative design to further principle enactment (Oshima et al., 2006). To help teachers gradually become attuned to the principle-based approach, KB implementation in phases has been tried, for example, developing a collaborative KB culture or To introduce KB, teacher-education opportunities should model the KB approach; instead of reproducing current best KB practices, teachers work as knowledge builders to solve authentic problems of teaching . ...
In this article we review the Knowledge-Building literature, unpacking its conceptual framework, principle-based pedagogy, distinctive features, and issues regarding scalability and sustainability. The Knowledge-Building goal is to reframe education as a knowledge-creating enterprise, engaging students from the earliest years of schooling. Despite a 30-year program of research and development and recognition that there is a close fit between Knowledge Building and efforts to meet knowledge society needs, Knowledge Building is frequently reinterpreted along the general lines of bringing constructivist learning into schooling rather than means to reframing education as a knowledge-creating enterprise. This article aims to clarify Knowledge-Building goals and to make the opportunities afforded by Knowledge Building more accessible.
