Jan Van Aalst

• B.Sc, M. Sc., B. Ed., Ph. D.
• Professor (Associate) at The University of Hong Kong

Supporting productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) in low‐achieving students is an important but challenging goal in education. This study used a knowledge‐building inquiry approach augmented by reflective assessment to facilitate low‐achieving students' PDE. A quasi‐experimental design method was employed to examine the effects of reflective asse...

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...

This research consisted of two studies to investigate how the Chinese rural educational system supported students' online learning and to determine the factors that influenced students' online learning quality (satisfaction and cognitive and social presence) during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Study 1, based on interviews with three curriculum officers,...

This study investigated the role and process of self‐directed reflective assessment (SDRA) enhanced by learning analytics to support pre‐service teachers' (PTs') collective empowerment in a knowledge‐building (KB) classroom. The participants were 43 second‐year PTs from a compulsory course taught by a teacher who had 2 years' teaching experience. A...

This study explored how educational robotics (ER) was implemented in classrooms to foster creativity among elementary school students and identified challenges associated with its implementation. Twenty‐six teachers at different elementary schools were interviewed. In‐depth teacher interviews and grounded theory were used to collect and analyze the...

We examined the facilitation of shared epistemic agency through a knowledge‐building (KB) design that included analytics‐supported collective reflective assessment (AsCRA). Forty undergraduate students taking a Liberal Studies course at a university in central China used the promising ideas tool and the knowledge building discourse explorer to self...

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...

The establishment of e-learning in higher education institutions in Tanzania has so far led to disappointing learning outcomes. The strategy used by instructors to practice e-learning and their ways of working with technologies does not encourage active learning, which in turn hampers student learning outcomes. The purpose of this study was to expl...

This study describes the socio-cognitive dynamics of collaborative online knowledge-building discourse among Dutch Master of Education students from the perspective of openness. A socio-cognitive openness framework consisting of four social and four cognitive components was used to analyze contributions to online collective knowledge building proce...

Virtual learning environments are used in higher education around the world to promote student learning. However, in many countries it has not yielded the expected effect on student interaction and learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the use of certain pedagogical approaches would promote student interaction, higher-order...

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...

The rapid development of social media tools has increased interest in their pedagogical value. It has been suggested that social media tools such as wikis can promote online collaborative and interactive learning. This study investigated the value of wikis in supporting collaborative group writing quality among secondary school students in Hong Kon...

The goal of this study was to develop a classification for a range of discourse patterns that occur in text-based asynchronous discussion forums, and that can aid in the distinction of three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge building. The dataset was taken from Knowledge Forum® databases in the Knowledge B...

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 study investigated synchronous discourses involving student collaboration in fixed groups during an introductory research methods course’s first 8-week phase, and opportunistic collaboration during its second 8-week phase. Twenty-seven Chinese undergraduates participated in online discourse on Knowledge Forum as part of the course. A multi-fac...

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...

Design research is an emerging paradigm in the study of learning. It is far from a mature methodology, as it faces a variety of difficulties, one of which is the characterization of the research process. We mapped the design trajectory proposed by Sandoval to capture the complex process of design research. The design trajectory map develops Sandova...

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...

The authors have investigated ways of learning in different cultures for several decades. This chapter describes some of the methodological problems we have faced, and some of our findings. In particular, the chapter notes what types of comparisons of learning can be justified, and the analytic methods appropriate for conducting such comparisons. ©...

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 aimed to examine the effect of flexible group collaboration on students' constructive discourse in a principle-based CSCL environment. The participants included 27 Chinese undergraduate students taking a 16-week introductory research methods course. The online discourse adopted a flexible collaboration structure: fixed small group collab...

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...

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...

Idea improvement is a key characteristic of knowledge building where ideas are conceptualized as improvable and epistemic objects to sustained inquiry. However, despite its importance in this theory, little research exists that focuses on the process of idea improvement. In this paper we examine the development of ideas within a community of learne...

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...

The phrase ‘knowledge creation’ refers to the practices by which a community advances its collective knowledge. Experience with a model of knowledge creation could help students to learn about the nature of science. This research examined how much progress a teacher and 16 Primary Five (Grade 4) students in the International Baccalaureate Primary Y...

At a number of U.S. universities, some physicists are focusing their research effort on physics education research (PER). This paper examines this development in terms of the knowledge of teaching and learning, curriculum projects and practices it has produced. First, a selective review of research and curriculum development projects provides an in...

We report results obtained with the Maryland Physics Expectations (MPEX) survey in: (a) a course for students who have not previously taken a second course in physics in high school; (b) physics for the life sciences; (c) honors physics; and (d) physics for engineers. Comparing the responses with a group of experienced teachers Redish et al. call t...

Productive multivocality in CSCL has been the focus of a series of workshops involving the comparison and contrasting of multiple analyses of the same datasets, with the goal of learning how different epistemologies and analysis methods of collaborative learning can complement each other and allow a more complete understanding to emerge. A prerequi...

This article discusses the potential of Google Scholar as an alternative or complement to the Web of Science and Scopus for measuring the impact of journal articles in education. Three handbooks on research in science education, language education, and educational technology were used to identify a sample of 112 accomplished scholars. Google Schola...

This paper reports our progress in using the Knowledge Space Visualizer (KSV) as a tool for formative assessment of online discourse. Whereas social network analysis has been used in research on computer-supported collaborative learning, it only examines the social structure of discourse participants, and does not provide information about the cont...

This study provides an exploration of physics teaching and learning in a classroom in Hong Kong. The goal of the study was to understand how to develop Bereiter and Scardamalia's knowledge building approach for Asian contexts in away that is sensitive to Asian values. The paper reviews some aspects of learning physics in Asia from a Confucian-herit...

Questions about the suitability of cognitively-oriented instructional approaches for students of different academic levels are frequently raised by teachers and researchers. This study examined student participation in knowledge-building discourse in two implementations of a short inquiry unit focusing on environmental problems. Participants in eac...

The study reported here sought to obtain the clear articulation of asynchronous computer-mediated discourse needed for Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia’s knowledge-creation model. Distinctions were set up between three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge creation. These were applied to the asynchronous...

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...

Current curriculum reforms in Hong Kong emphasize learning how to learn and project-based learning. The most recent reform introduces “Liberal Studies” as a mandatory school subject in senior secondary school. This article reports on an exploratory case study of the information searching process (ISP) among Form 6 (Grade 12) students in a Liberal S...

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...

Researchers say that teachers can implement an educational innovation without adhering to the principles underpinning its design. Such principles may not adequately take typical classroom conditions into account. The goal of this study was to explore tensions between attempts to implement the principles underpinning knowledge building and the influ...

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...

Content analyses of computer databases parsed into notes or ideas do not shed adequate light on the role of collaboration and the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning environment in knowledge building; analysis of what is happening in the classroom and how students interpret that is also needed. This study used ethnographic methods to explore...

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...

Research on asynchronous learning networks (ALNs) has indicated that there are problems with both the quantity and quality of online interactions that can undermine the aim of inquiry. The goal of this paper is to offer a new way of thinking about these problems in the context of knowledge building, a specific form of collaborative inquiry supporte...

Viennot, L. (2003). Teaching Physics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 1–4020–1275–6

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...

The goal of this study was to explore the dynamics of the formation and development of CSCL communities, which is believed to reflect, to a large extent, the interaction among learners. Two different types of CSCL communities (grade four students and teacher education) were investigated. The data representing note reading were analyzed from a non-l...

Taylor, P.C., Gilmer, P.J. & Tobin, K. (Eds.). (2002). Transforming Undergraduate Science Teaching: Social Constructivist Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 0–8204–5293–9

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...

Differences in students' participation in knowledge building communities are examined with reference to a sociocultural perspective on participation as an essential component of learning. Students who are members of cultural and linguistic minority groups may have difficulty in gaining opportunities for practice for reasons related to language diff...

Minority students' participation in on-line discourse is discussed with reference to sociocultural perspectives on discourse and learning, which suggest that cultural and linguistic minority students' opportunities for full participation may be diminished, negatively impacting their learning.

Minority students' participation in on-line discourse is discussed with reference to sociocultural perspectives on discourse and learning, which suggest that cultural and linguistic minority students' opportunities for full participation may be diminished, negatively impacting their learning.

This study examined knowledge building inquiry and discourse among high-school students using Knowledge Forum in a Hong Kong classroom. The goals were to characterize knowledge building inquiry and discourse, examine change over time, and investigate whether knowledge building is related to conceptual understanding. The key features of this learnin...

At a number of U.S. universities, some physicists are focusing their research effort on physics education research (PER). This paper examines this development in terms of the knowledge of teaching and learning, curriculum projects and practices it has produced. First, a selective review of research and curriculum development projects provides an in...

Following a theoretical analysis of constructivist approaches to collaborative learning, a curriculum development model, the Learning to Knowledge Building Model, is proposed. Two empirical studies of student work with Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environment (CSILE) are then presented; these lend support to the model and explicate in de...

We develop a 2×3 model to guide formative assessment of Bereiter and Scardamalia's knowledge creation. The notion of students as both knowledge creators and assessors of their own learning gives rise to theoretical and methodological issues; we explore these by putting them under a broad array of powerful theoretical perspectives, which involve the...

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Alberta, 1986. Includes bibliographical references.