James D. Slotta

• Boston College

The term, Active Learning (AL) is commonly used in describing pedagogical approaches that engages learners actively in classrooms, with an emphasis on problem solving, inquiry and reflection. While a growing body of evidence supports the effectiveness of such an approach, there is great variation in defining the specific strategies and approaches,...

This design-based research study brought the pedagogical methods of active learning and user-generated content into a post-secondary seminar using scripted workshops and scaffolded assignments to immerse students in the real-life experience of working with actual musical artists. The site was a fourth-year undergraduate music business course. It wa...

Active learning has expanded into mainstream education, in Canada and internationally. However, there remains a lack of theoretical accounts and formal design frameworks. This symposium presents a set of theoretical perspectives: (1) defining active learning and its relationship with learning community pedagogy, (2) pedagogical approaches for activ...

K-12 classroom settings are not yet incorporating emerging technologies such as ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, nor even touch surfaces, despite the significant impact that such media have made in many other aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, classroom environments have not generally evolved to support students in the new modes of collab...

This design-based research study brought the pedagogical methods of active learning and user-generated content into a post-secondary seminar using scripted tasks and scaffolded assignments to immerse students in the real-life experience of working with actual musical artists. The course was built upon a philosophy of social constructivism to create...

There is an emerging consensus that effective and sustainable implementation of instructional innovations such as active learning can only be achieved through new ways of conceptualizing the transfer of knowledge from research to practice and vice versa (Biesta, 2007; Broekkamp and van Hout-Wolters, 2007; Vanderlinde and van Braak, 2010). Research-...

This book represents the emerging efforts of a growing international network of researchers and practitioners to promote the development and uptake of evidence-based pedagogies in higher education, at a level approaching large-scale impact. By offering a communication venue that attracts and enhances much needed partnerships among practitioners and...

This design-based research (DBR) study examined the ways in which a learning community approach can be enacted in large undergraduate lecture courses through a scaffolded, complex curricular design that utilizes active and inquiry-based learning. By combining a traditional lecture with breakout tutorials, the study involved two iterations, firstly...

We report on a multi-year design study of a technology environment called Common Knowledge (CK), designed to support learning communities in K-12 classrooms. Students represent their ideas in the form of notes, add their ideas to a collective knowledge base, and use this knowledge base as a resource for their subsequent inquiries. CK supports teach...

This research paper presents the design of an active learning curriculum and corresponding software environment called CKBiology, reporting on its implementation in two sections of a Grade 12 Biology course across three design cycles. Guided by a theoretical framework called Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), we employed a design-based research...

This paper reports on the design and implementation of several student-and teacher-facing learning analytics representations within a blended learning community curriculum for Grade 12 Biology. Using a custom designed technology environment called CKBiology, these representations captured the real-time progress of the learning community at three le...

In this poster, we present the design of a group-formation tool used to support the orchestration of a Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) curriculum in Grade 12 Biology. The tool was built as part of a broader learning environment called CKBiology, and enables the teacher to form groups “in the moment” using on protocols such as group by progres...

This paper describes our efforts to add structure and formalism to the design of a CSCL curriculum for high school science–integrating individual, collaborative and whole-class inquiry activities into a coherent “learning community.” A pedagogical model called Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) guided our design of a curricular sequence in which...

Several research programs have investigated the use of technology enhanced learning environments to support collective inquiry in science. In a departure from traditional forms of instruction, which maintain an emphasis on individual achievement, Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) is a pedagogical model in which students work together collaborat...

MOOCs have the potential to benefit from the large number of very diverse learners that participate in courses, but this requires a principled approach to MOOC curriculum development. Courses need to take into consideration the diversity of learner experience and intentions, and incorporate scripts that both benefit from the large numbers of learne...

We developed and piloted the Pioneer Valley CS (PVCS) Collaboratory employing theoretical constructs from the learning sciences and while leveraging educational technology design principles. Our approach prioritizes new science learning opportunities through social exchanges around data collection and interpretation issues during socioecological CS...

This symposium presents our efforts to reconceptualize learning spaces from their traditional notions as bound and immutable to a view in which the physical and social boundaries are flexible and dynamically connected to the learning itself. We present the work from five international research centers that consider space as a multi-dimensional medi...

Emerging wearable technologies (or wearables) are promising in different contexts, but continuing research is needed to explore their utility. One such context is K-12 classrooms where teachers engage in "classroom orchestration" to manage activities and information, monitor student activity, and track their own curricular plans. In order to explor...

In this practitioner presentation, we propose a possible application for the use of temporal analytics in an elementary science classroom that has adopted a Knowledge Community and Inquiry approach to a 9-week curriculum unit on astronomy. We describe a multi-phase curricular script that includes activities conducted using an online note-writing pl...

Climate change is not local; it is global. This means that many environmental issues related to climate change are not geographically limited and hence concern humans in more than one location. There is a growing body of research indicating that today’s increased climate change is caused by human activities and our modern lifestyle. Consequently, c...

This chapter describes a 12-week physics curriculum that engaged students as a knowledge community across contexts: in their classroom, home, neighborhoods, and in the smart classroom. In order to support the curriculum intervention, we developed two complementary technology environments that are built on SAIL Smart Space (S3)-an open-source techno...

This paper presents the preliminary instruction design and enactment of a collaborative concept-mapping project on Food and Nutrition in the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) platform with grade 7 students (n=25) in an urban high school in Canada. In this study, we present the design of the collaborative inquiry curriculum and examine st...

In this symposium we consider the physical space of the classroom in order to understand how location can be used as an input or information source for knowledge- building activities. Five posters encapsulate several projects, addressing the role of physical or locational elements within our work, including their role in the pedagogical design, the...

This paper presents findings from a new curriculum called the SpacePlanting project (http://spaceplanting.coe.missouri.edu), where learners conduct realistic plant growth experimentation to learn principles of plant biology. By working with plant growth chambers and model-based simulations, learners produce data that serve as a source for further a...

Teachers are not typically involved as participatory designers in the design of technology-enhanced learning environments. As they have unique and valuable perspec- tives on the role of technology in education, it is of utmost importance to engage them in a participatory design process. Adopting a case study methodology, we aim to reveal in what wa...

This paper explores Epistemic Cognition (EC) at the collective level within the context of an inquiry curriculum for high school biology. The "EvoRoom" curriculum was 10 weeks in duration, with two major units in evolution and biodiversity as well as a rich media "immersive simulation" activity and a field trip to a local zoo. All activities were d...

Digitally augmented physical spaces (e.g., smart classrooms) offer opportunities to engage students in novel and potentially transformative learning experiences. This paper presents an immersive rainforest simulation and collective inquiry activity where students collect observational data from the environment and explore their peers' data through...

Digitally augmented physical spaces (e.g. smart classrooms) offer opportunities to engage students in novel and potentially transformative learning experiences. This paper presents an immersive rainforest simulation and a mobile inquiry platform where co-located students collect observational data from the environment and explore their peers' data...

This paper reports on student peer collaboration in an online environment in an international shared curriculum, the Global Climate Exchange. Four cohorts of students (age 16 -19) from Canada, China, Norway and Sweden (n=157) were engaged in four wiki-based activities where they collaborated with peers locally and internationally. Previously, impac...

This article presents the design of an immersive simulation and inquiry activity for technology-enhanced classrooms. Using a co-design method, researchers worked with a high school biology teacher to create a rainforest simulation, distributed across several large displays in the room to immerse students in the environment. The authors created and...

This paper describes PLACE-a 12-week cross-contexts curriculum for grade 11 physics that engaged students at home, in class, in their neighbourhoods, and in a smart classroom setting. Using a design-based research approach we introduce a smart classroom infrastructure (SAIL Smart Space; S3) and investigate its role in supporting students in the cur...

Learners' physical performances can serve as focal objects for reflection and insight across a variety of contexts and content areas. This session brings together a set of projects that leverage the physical performances of learners, construct concrete and abstract representations of those performances, and investigate how learners reflect on and u...

This paper presents the design of an immersive simulation and collective inquiry activity for exploring evolutionary concepts in a Grade 11 Biology course. Researchers and a high school science teacher co-designed a curriculum around a room-sized simulation of a rainforest. Using several large displays stitched together on each wall of the room, we...

This paper presents our research of a pedagogical model known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), focusing on our design of a technological infrastructure for the orchestration of the complex CSCL scripts that characterize KCI curricula. We first introduce the KCI model including some basic design principles, and describe its dependency on re...

This chapter describes the recent evolution of the Internet into a set of socially oriented applications collectively referred to as Web 2.0, and discusses the application of these new functions for educational purposes. We suggest that to take full advantage of social, semantic, and aggregative properties of Web 2.0, the technologies must be integ...

This paper presents two iterations of our design of an immersive simulation and inquiry activity for exploring evolutionary concepts in a Grade 11 Biology course. Interacting with large projected displays of animated rainforest flora and fauna, students worked as "field researchers" to observe changes in life forms occurring over a 200 million year...

This symposium brings together four research groups that have been working on advancing theoretical models of guidance for CSCL. The models share the emphasis on scripting and orchestration but vary in terms of their specific focus, grain size of collaboration, and the nature of learning activities they address. The goals of this symposium are, fir...

This study examined teacher's role in a Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) curriculum. Three science teachers and their students in a climate change curriculum unit involved in this design-based research. Curriculum design documents and video recordings of teacher-students interactions were the sources of data. Grounded theory coding techniques...

We present two case studies of scientific inquiry with Embedded Phenomena, where two middle school science classes participate in whole-class investigations of phenomena that are embedded within their classroom. Students share observational data with their peers using networked handheld devices. Student-contributed data is collected, aggregated and...

When asked about their experiences with collaborative learning, students typically mention (a) unequal participation by students - up to free-riding, and (b) dissatisfaction with the assessment of collaborative learning. In fact, as inequality of participation increases - especially when there is a free-rider in a group - the call for diversified a...

This study reports on the continued development of Common Knowledge (CK) - a pedagogical and technological innovation that supports knowledge building blended discourse. Students use handheld tablets to contribute notes to a community knowledge base, which is publicly displayed on the classroom's interactive whiteboard (IWB). This aggregate display...

In a designed-based study, we investigated the viability of knowledge communities in secondary school science classrooms using Knowledge Community and Inquiry model to guide curriculum design. Based on findings from iteration 1, scaffolds were added to the designed curriculum unit in iteration 2 to help students plan and monitor their collaborative...

Misconceptions about engineering and science concepts persist among engineering students, and some are resistant even to direct instruction. This paper reports on a unique form of computer-based online learning module, designed to help engineering undergraduates learn difficult concepts in the thermal and transport sciences (specifically, heat tran...

This paper presents a design study of a collective inquiry model for high school Physics, where student-contributions are captured, aggregated, tagged and represented in a coherent visualization. We have developed a flexible technology layer that supports the aggregation of peer responses, including the collection of student explanations and semant...

This paper introduces a series of iterative designs that investigate how the aggregation and visualization of student-contributed work can support collaborative problem solving in the domain of physics. We investigate how new technologies can enable students to contribute to a shared knowledge base, working across contexts: in class, at home, and i...

Multi-touch tables, interactive whiteboards, motion sensitive interfaces, physical and tangible computers, all present enticing new functional affordances for learning. However, this constitutes a problem space for design, rather than any specific solution. What forms of learning can now be supported by a multi-user touch screen? How can such learn...

Prior knowledge is one of the most important factors for learning. During the iterative cycles of inquiry learning, learners' prior domain knowledge is modified, refined, and further developed, provided that learners act upon self-assessments of their understanding and that they can actually think of appropriate hypotheses. Furthermore, knowledge a...

This paper presents a longitudinal study of teacher professional development that supports teachers through two interventions, namely scaffolded reflection and peer-exchange, and enables teachers to strengthen their learning of complex Web 2.0 practices within a community of learners. Teachers develop such knowledge only through authentic classroom...

Interactive surfaces and spaces are entering classrooms and other learning settings. This symposium brings together leaders in the field to establish a coherent research agenda for interactive surfaces inside the learning sciences. We demonstrate the broad applicability of these technologies, outline advantages and disadvantages, present relevant a...

Research on scripting computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has recently received a lot of attention. However, most findings within this research grew out of studies focusing scripting online collaborative learning activities that often had an asynchronous nature and were conducted in artificial settings. This symposium includes an inter...

The work presented here is a product of a collaborative effort to develop a knowledge community and inquiry curriculum for elementary science, where students engage in extended investigations of simulated scientific phenomena presumed to occupy the physical space of their classrooms. By their immersive nature, these "embedded phenomena" lend themse...

Studies exploring how students learn and understand science processes such as diffusion and natural selection typically find that students provide misconceived explanations of how the patterns of such processes arise (such as why giraffes' necks get longer over generations, or how ink dropped into water appears to "flow"). Instead of explaining the...

This paper shares preliminary findings on a new program of research on collaborative learning in smart classrooms. Using a co-design method, researchers worked with high school teachers to create engaging curriculum activities that provided the context for two studies in math and physics. The activity designs aim to increase the depth of students'...

This article responds to an article by A. Gupta, D. Hammer, and E. F. Redish (2010) that asserts that M. T. H. Chi's (1992, 2005) hypothesis of an oontological commitmento in conceptual development is fundamentally flawed. In this article, I argue that Chi's theoretical perspective is still very much intact and that the critique offered by Gupta et...

This symposium brings together some of the leading CSCL researchers from China with the purpose of introducing them to the wider CSCL community. China has a strong recent history of CSCL research, but has yet to make real connections to the Western research literature. In part, this is due to the language barrier, but China also holds distinct rese...

Jim Slotta is a cognitive scientist and associate professor of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. In 2006, he was named Canada Research chair in the area of education and technology. He also received the 2006 World Technology Award in the category of education. Prof. Slotta's current res...

Developing a systems perspective is a commonly cited goal for geosciences courses and programs. This perspective is a powerful tool for critical thinking, problem solving and integrative thinking across and beyond the sciences. In April 2010, a NSF funded `On the Cutting Edge' workshop brought together 45 geoscience faculty, education and cognitive...

This paper describes how we have adapted the WISE technology and curriculum for use in an international setting. We also report on a cross-cultural collaboration between the two authors, representing the WISE project in the U.S. and its counterpart, called Viten (see http://viten.no) in Norway. After introducing the WISE platform and describing our...

Researchers in the learning sciences have long recognized the potential of online spaces to support learning activities; however, the pervasiveness of social media construction typically associated with “Web 2.0” represents a new context for researching learning and instruction. This chapter reports two studies that used a wiki to deliver a new cur...

As part of a larger research study (see Peters & Slotta, 2010), we designed a collaborative wiki-based activity that engaged secondary students in co-creating a community knowledge base to serve as a resource for a subsequent inquiry activity. Over eight weeks, 112 students from four sections of a high school biology course contributed to a common...

This paper shares preliminary findings from a designed-based study of the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model for secondary science curriculum. We investigate the impact of the model on students' cooperative knowledge construction and their understanding of the science of climate change. Working closely with a science teacher, we co-designe...

This research investigates student collaboration in a high school biology curriculum that was based on the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model. Using co-design, the researchers collaborated with three high school science teachers to design a curriculum where 112 grade-ten biology students collaboratively developed a community wiki about Can...

Teachers serve as critical mediators of student learning. As such, teachers' expertise and learning remain important foci for theoretical development and empirical research. Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) has been forwarded as an underutilized but potentially powerful tool for educational research, including teachers' expertise, practic...

New social media for collaborative knowledge construction, often associated with "Web 2.0," represent an emerging context for the research of learning and instruction. Wikis, for example, allow methods of collaborative knowledge construction that were very difficult to achieve with previous technologies. Applications of wikis and related technologi...

Previous studies reported that misconceptions related to heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics, persist among engineering juniors and seniors even after they have completed college-level courses in the subjects. This study focuses on developing methods to repair some particularly robust misconceptions in diffusion, heat transfer, and m...

The Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) supports research on student learning and design of curriculum materials. An international community of researchers, teachers, designers, and technologists contribute to the ongoing success of WISE. The community has helped shape the knowledge integration framework that synthesizes findings in design...

WISE is a software platform that enables easy authoring and exchange of educational materials amongst learning science researchers. This paper charts the recent evolution of the WISE technology, sharing lessons learned and describing a new open source framework called SAIL. We identify key challenges and design principles for technology-enhanced le...