Carol K. K. Chan

• Ph.D.
• Professor at The University of Hong Kong

Knowledge building (KB) competencies are crucial for undergraduates’ creative knowledge work and academic success. While there is substantial research on KB discourse, there are limited efforts in examining how KB competencies in the conceptual, metacognitive, socio-emotional, and epistemic dimensions are demonstrated in KB discourse and how the co...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This study investigates how secondary school students developed discourse understanding and engaged in productive discourse through a learning analytics-supported blended approach in a knowledge building environment. The study involved 15 10th-grade students studying visual arts in a Hong Kong secondary school. Students worked on collective inquiry...

This study examined students’ understanding of, and reflective inquiry into discourse, specifically their epistemic discourse understanding and meta-discourse, and investigated their roles and relationships in fostering productive inquiry in knowledge building. The participants comprised two classes of ninth grade visual arts students inquiring int...

Previous studies suggested that epistemically more sophisticated students learned better in a constructivist learning context than epistemically less sophisticated students did. This study further examined if students with higher prior epistemic beliefs (EB High) had better learning gains than students with lower prior epistemic beliefs (EB Low) in...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educational activities have shifted online, providing opportunities for researchers to analyze interaction data between teachers and students. In this study, we focus on automatically annotating dialog acts in one-on-one tutoring on online platforms. We address the challenge of limited training data, particularly for “...

This symposium brings together scholars from the international Knowledge Building community to advance an emerging line of research that aims to strengthen infrastructures for Knowledge Building and tell the "untold stories" of infrastructuring activities that are key for implementing and sustaining Knowledge Building in various contexts. Infrastru...

This study examined the design of a learning environment to promote pre-service teachers’ collaborative dialogic inquiry and theory-practice integration using online discussion enriched with dialogic scaffolds. Participants included eighty-one pre-service teachers studying an Educational Inquiry course and engaging in online group discussions refle...

Knowledge Building is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes students’ collective responsibility to continuously improve their community knowledge. Advancing the frontiers of community knowledge is an exciting but challenging process, especially for low-achieving students, because it involves a continuous experience of cognitive disequilibrium and...

Helping pre-service teachers (PSTs) develop competencies in collaborative inquiry and knowledge building is crucial, but this subject remains largely unexplored in CSCL. This study examines the design and process of collaborative analytics-supported reflective assessment and its effects on promoting PSTs to develop their competencies in collaborati...

Although classroom discourse that positions students as active participants benefits both their learning and cognitive development, teachers often find it challenging to implement dialogic instructions in the classroom. This study reports on a video-based teacher professional development (PD) program that leverages visualizations and analytics in s...

This paper reports on the continual effort of the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) connecting teachers within and across schools for knowledge creation and community building during the COVID-19 disruptions. During this crisis, schools around the world are challenged with the issues of implementing online learning. Three areas of misalignment wer...

This study examines the problem of the fragmentation of asynchronous online discourse by using the Knowledge Connection Analyzer (KCA) framework and tools and explores how students could use the KCA data in classroom reflections to deepen their knowledge building (KB) inquiry. We applied the KCA to nine Knowledge Forum® (KF) databases to examine th...

Despite major theoretical progress in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), relatively less attention has been paid to the problem of how research advances may impact schools and classrooms. Given the global changes and educational policies for twenty-first-century education, issues of how research in CSCL can be integrated with classro...

This paper examines the alignment of education with the needs for knowledge creation in the digital age using the Knowledge Building model and Knowledge Forum® technology. Knowledge Building is akin to knowledge creation as practiced in research laboratories and other frontier-advancing organizations, with added focus on value to the individual, co...

Purpose This paper draws on Kauffman's theory of the “adjacent possible” to make sense of the practices which have emerged in response to school and university closures in Hong Kong and reflects on what opportunities exist in this current global crisis. Design/methodology/approach This paper drew on qualitative data from two emergent practices – t...

How to help teachers learn and foster productive classroom talk? In what ways can video be used to support teacher learning? This article presents a randomized controlled trial examining the efficacy of using visualizations to enhance video use in a teacher professional development program. Free online copy is available at: https://tinyurl.com/yymh...

This study examined the role of Knowledge Building (KB), enriched with Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, in supporting students' understanding of scientific practices and ecosystem concepts. Students’ shared epistemic agency were characterized to examine the different patterns of strategies that students deployed while engaging in knowledge buildi...

This paper reports on an ongoing investigation of a video-based teacher professional development (TPD) approach enriched by visual learning analytics in teacher education, using a Classroom-Discourse-Analyser platform to help teacher educators engage in evidence-based reflections and online interaction with peers and facilitators. The study aimed t...

This study seeks to understand the emotional connection of teachers' academically productive talk (APT) with student learning from the students' perspective. Using a sample of 2,225 students (N7th grade = 1,146 and N8th grade = 1,079) from 16 middle schools in a city of China, we investigate the relationship between students' perceptions of their t...

This study investigates designs for developing knowledge building (KB) and higher order competencies among academically low-achieving students. Thirty-seven low-achieving students from a ninth-grade visual arts course in Hong Kong participated. The design involved principle-based KB pedagogy, with students writing on Knowledge Forum® (KF), enriched...

This workshop aims to engage participants in discussing and deriving the problem-space surrounding assessment and environment for knowledge building. The problem-space aims to map the types of data (text-based and multimodal data), hypotheses of the learning attributes (visible and invisible) to be derived from these data, and the related annotatio...

This study investigates the learning approach of the designed Flipped Reading Platform (FRP) and its effects on primary school students' general Chinese reading and comprehension capabilities. This study was undertaken as part of the Quality Education Fund project in Hong Kong, titled "Flipped Reading: Enhancing the Learning and Teaching of Reading...

This study examined how reflective assessment supported by principles facilitated metadiscourse for knowledge advances mediated by Knowledge Forum® (KF). Participants were 60 tertiary students in two classes engaging in knowledge building and reflecting on their collaborative knowledge building using e-portfolios; one class was a principle-based kn...

This study characterized students' online collaborative discourse from a theory-building perspective and examined its relation to epistemic and conceptual understanding. Fifty-two fifth graders' Knowledge Forum discussions on electricity were analysed. Discourse moves were coded within the inquiry threads, and two key epistemic patterns were identi...

This study examined the role of computer-supported knowledge-building discourse and epistemic reflection in promoting elementary-school students’ scientific epistemology and science learning. The participants were 39 Grade 5 students who were collectively pursuing ideas and inquiry for knowledge advance using Knowledge Forum (KF) while studying a u...

The symposium focuses on the analysis of the knowledge building process e.g. idea improvement conversations by which students get to a high quality of knowledge and understanding. Learning Analytics (LA) focuses on the collection, measure and analysis of data about learners and their contexts (Long & Siemens, 2011). LA tools are normally rooted in...

This study investigated whether and how students with low prior achievement can carry out and benefit from reflective assessment supported by the Knowledge Connections Analyzer (KCA) to collaboratively improve their knowledge-building discourse. Participants were a class of 20 Grade 11 students with low achievement taking visual art from an experie...

This chapter explores how the design of knowledge-building inquiry promotes conceptual change in chemistry among high-school students in Hong Kong. The participants included 40 students who engaged in knowledge-building inquiry mediated by computer-supported Knowledge Forum database and a comparison class of 39 students who were instructed with con...

This study investigated how elementary-school children's science epistemologies can be fostered in a CSCL knowledge-building environment focusing on epistemic inquiry and reflection. Two classes of fifth graders in Hong Kong participated in a unit of electricity study. The design involves students engaging in scientific inquiry, pursuing ideas on K...

This study investigated the design of a computer supported knowledge-building environment in fostering 10-12 year olds' epistemic and conceptual understanding. Two classes of 5th graders in Guangzhou China participated in this study while they were learning a unit about electricity. One class engaged in knowledge building, supported with a computer...

This study aimed to identify the four key dimensions of epistemic beliefs that concern the nature of knowledge and knowing and examine their relationship with cognitive constructs, study approaches, and academic performance among Hong Kong college students. A 14-item scale was developed in three studies with independent samples of Hong Kong college...

The purpose of this study was to design and examine a computer-supported knowledge-building environment and to investigate both collective knowledge-building dynamics and individual learning in the context of a tertiary education course in mainland China. The participants were 102 students in four intact Year-one tertiary business classes. Two clas...

We propose a novel method for identifying questioning patterns, which are assumed to be one of the essential factors indicating the quality of knowledge-building discourse. The underlying principle of the proposed method is to extract syntactic and sematic information before segmenting the raw data and annotating them according to a multilayer fram...

This paper reports on an ongoing study that examined the design of a knowledge-building environment that integrates knowledge building and epistemic change theories in fostering conceptual and epistemic growth. The study uses a quasi-experimental design in which four classes of 5th graders in Hong Kong participated in a unit focusing on electricity...

This paper reports on an ongoing study that examined the design of a knowledge-building environment that integrates knowledge building and epistemic change theories in fostering conceptual and epistemic growth. The study uses a quasi-experimental design in which four classes of 5th graders in Hong Kong participated in a unit focusing on electricity...

Learning scientists conduct basic research into how people learn, and draw on this basic research to design new routines, tools, and curricula to improve learning. When these designs take the form of classroom-level interventions in schools, the teacher is a key participant, determining how any intervention is realized and sustained in practice. Fo...

Learning to read is very challenging for Hong Kong children who learn English as a second language (ESL), as they must acquire two very different writing systems, beginning at the age of three. Few studies have examined the role of phonological awareness at the subsyllabic levels, oral language proficiency, and L1 tone awareness in L2 English readi...

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction whic...

We report an exploratory study of discourse analysis, focusing on explaining the analytic approach. It is argued that most knowledge-building studies have taken a cognitively-oriented approach to examine collaborative discourse; therefore their findings do not shed light on how idea improvement is accomplished socially. The study employs thematic n...

This study examined the effects of two designed learning environments for knowledge building. Two groups of first year Chinese tertiary students learning business English were engaged in a strong form of a knowledge-building environment (Principle-based Learning Environment, PBLE) and a weak form of knowledge-building environment (Knowledge Forum L...

We discuss knowledge building in the context of government examinations in Hong Kong, and the need to develop twenty-first-century skills. Following this, we describe two pedagogical designs intended to develop knowledge building in this context: A gradual approach to develop it in four phases – developing a collaborative classroom culture, engagin...

The study assessed students' understanding of collaborative discourse and examined the role of knowledge building environment augmented with reflective assessment in fostering more sophisticated views of collaborative discourse among students. One language teacher and 31 high school students in Hong Kong participated in this study. Data were collec...

In this study, we designed and examined a principle-based knowledge building environment that aimed to (a) promote collaboration, deep learning and domain understanding among Chinese tertiary students, (b) characterize knowledge building discourse patterns to understand the changes. The quasi-experimental design involved two groups of students: one...

This study investigated the role of collective knowledge building in promoting scientific inquiry and achievements among Hong Kong high-school chemistry students. The participants included 34 Grade 10 (15-16 years old) students who engaged in collective inquiry and progressive discourse, using Knowledge Forum@, a computer-supported learning environ...

Blogging has been recommended as a suitable tool for learning during internship due to its associated usefulness in collaborative learning, reflection, communication, and social support. Blogging was incorporated in the internship activities of two discipline-specific groups of interns: information management (n = 53) and nursing (n = 28). In exami...

This discussion paper for this special issue examines co-regulation of learning in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments extending research on self-regulated learning in computerbased environments. The discussion employs a socio-cognitive perspective focusing on social and collective views of learning to examine how students...

We describe the development of an SQL-based formative assessment system, the Knowledge Connections Analzyer (KCA), which is designed to provide evidence on four general questions that students may have about their work in an asynchronous online discussion environment: (1) Are we collaborating? (2) Are we putting our knowledge together? (3) How do i...

This study examined students’ views of collaboration and learning, and investigated how these predict students’ online participation in a computer-supported learning environment. The participants were 521 secondary school students in Hong Kong, who took part in online collaborative inquiry conducted using Knowledge Forum™. We developed a questionna...

This work proposes a theoretical perspective on formative assessment that is more consistent with knowledge building. Based on this, a system for assessing knowledge building and collaborative learning was designed and developed. The system converts a Knowledge Forum tuplestore to an SQL database and then utilizes queries based on four types of gen...

Despite major theoretical progress in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), relatively less attention has been paid to the problem of how research advances may impact schools and classrooms. Given the global changes and educational policies for twenty-first century education, issues of how research in CSCL can be integrated with classro...

Learning in biomedical engineering is highly interdisciplinary: students need to integrate concepts between engineering and life sciences, and be able to design and develop technologies with physiological considerations. In this study, biomedical engineering students' artifacts were analyzed in detail according to the structure-behavior-framework (...

A common underlying theme in education in the contemporary era is the need for change at all levels of education to prepare citizens for life in the knowledge society. The knowledge society is characterized by increasing globalization, progressively shorter half-lives of knowledge, the increasing importance of knowledge creation in sustaining devel...

Over the past two decades, researchers have accorded increasing attention to understanding Chinese students. This interest has been spurred by many factors, including the consistently high performance of East Asian students in cross-national studies of achievement (e.g., Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Chrostowski, 2004a, 2004b; Organization for Econom...

Since the pioneering work on the paradox of the Chinese learner (Watkins & Biggs, 1996; 2001), there has been growing enthusiasm for examining teaching and learning for Chinese learners (Fan, Wong, Cai, & Li, 2004; Lee & Mok, 2008; Rastall, 2006). Biggs (1996) examined Western misperceptions and discussed the importance of sociocultural, contextual...

In the introduction to this volume, we highlighted the need to revisit the Chinese learner against the background of socioeconomic and technological changes, shifts in learning paradigms, new educational policies and widespread curriculum reforms. This volume has examined the contemporary Chinese learner of the 21st century considering the changing...

This study examined the design and process of how students' reflective assessment promoted collaborative metacognition for conceptual and epistemic changes, mediated by Knowledge Forum, a computer-supported environment. The design involved augmenting knowledge-building inquiry with reflective assessment - Students wrote reflective summaries to trac...

This book examines teaching and learning in Chinese societies and advances understanding of ‘the Chinese learner’ in changing global contexts. Given the burgeoning research in this area, pedagogical shifts from knowledge transmission to knowledge construction to knowledge creation, wide-ranging social, economic and technological advances, and chang...

This study examines the Chinese learner in the current changing education contexts with their emphasis on 21st century learning goals of inquiry, teamwork, and learning how to learn. With socioeconomic and technological changes, internationalisation and educational reforms, pedagogical approaches developed in the Western countries, such as inquiry-...

Health education can offer a valuable window onto conceptual and behavioral change. In Study 1, we mapped out 3rd-grade Chinese children's beliefs about causes of colds and flu and ways they can be prevented. We also explored older adults' beliefs as a possible source of the children's ideas. In Study 2, we gave 3rd- and 4th-grade Chinese children...

Most studies have investigated college and high school students' epistemological beliefs in Western contexts, with few studies examining how beliefs about learning are related to children's strategies and comprehension in the Chinese cultural context. The present study investigated Chinese elementary school children's beliefs about learning and exa...

This study examined students' beliefs and strategies in project-based learning among International Business students in China and the relationships among these measures and their contribution to academic performance. In-depth interviews with 25 second-year students focused on their project learning experience examining their epistemology and strate...

This chapter examines the role of networked multimedia environments in supporting and advancing new educational models that emphasize inquiry, collaboration, and knowledge building. We first examine changing theories and metaphors of learning and consider how designs of multimedia networked environments are influenced by these changing views. Follo...

With theoretical advances conceptualizing learning as a social, distributed and collective process, there is a need to capture and assess community knowledge— knowledge as a social product that has an out-in-the-world existence and has value to a community. There has now been much progress in analyzing collaborative processes and interactions in CS...

This study aims to examine a design of computer-supported collaborative learning environment featured by Knowledge Forum with embedded teacher-student co- designed scaffolds and group portfolios as an assessment tool for Chinese tertiary business students and to further investigate how academic literacy develops in the designed environment. Four in...

Despite emphasis and progress in developing collaborative inquiry in computer-supported collaborative learning research, little attention has been given to examining how collective learning can be assessed in computer-supported collaborative learning classrooms, and how students can have agency in assessing their own collaborative process. We propo...

We describe the design of a knowledge-building environment and examine the roles of knowledge building principles and portfolios as scaffolds in fostering collaboration for students of different achievement levels. Students assessed their contribution in Knowledge Forum™ using rubrics and they wrote electronic portfolios and group reviews to assess...

We describe the design of a knowledge-building environment and examine the role of knowledge-building portfolios in characterizing and scaffolding collaborative inquiry. Our goal is to examine collaborative knowledge building in the context of exploring the alignment of learning, collaboration, and assessment in computer forums. The key design prin...

With the advent of the knowledge era, teacher education needs to prepare teachers to face the changing technological contexts and to model pedagogies and tools for better forms of learning. Despite much enthusiasm about the roles of technology in education, its role in transforming teacher learning, in ways aligned with advances in the learning sci...

In Hong Kong and Canada, indeed globally, slogans about learning to learn and teaching for 21st‐century knowledge and skills are common. However, there are few examples of how teacher education courses or programs are responding to these new demands. In this paper, we propose a framework for designing teacher education premised on the theoretical p...

The spontaneous utterances produced by 492 Cantonese‐speaking children aged 36–60 months in 30‐minute toy play contexts were collected. The incidence and percentage of different lexical classes, the ratio of noun and verb types and tokens were calculated. A statistically significant predominance of verb usage was found in the expressive utterances...

We describe the design of a knowledge-building environment and examine the roles of knowledge-building portfolios in characterizing and scaffolding collaborative inquiry. Three classes of Grade 9 students in Hong Kong used Knowledge Forum (KF) under several design conditions. Results showed (1) Students working on portfolios guided with knowledge b...

We explore the use of collaborative summary notes in Knowledge Forum™ (KF) as a way to capture the distributed nature of knowledge advances among groups of students building knowledge together. The purpose of this exploration is to develop assessments that can be used for scaffolding the discourse and promoting ideas within the community, as well a...

Background: Although there have been numerous studies conducted on the psychometric properties of Biggs' Learning Process Questionnaire (LPQ), these have involved the use of traditional omnibus measures of scale quality such as corrected item total correlations, internal consistency estimates of reliability, and factor analysis. However, these omn...

In this study, a descriptive quantitative methodology for categorical data analysis that works well with small samples was used to investigate whether Chinese students' conceptions of learning included memorisation as an integral part of understanding, as suggested by phenomenographic studies. Twenty-five Chinese students attending the B.Ed. progra...

This paper explores the design of knowledge building portfolios in assessing and scaffolding collaborative knowledge building. We sought (a) to examine how knowledge building portfolios can characterize and assess both individual and collective aspects of knowledge building; and (b) to investigate the roles of knowledge-building portfolios in foste...