Monica Resendes

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Consultant at Ontario Principals' Association

The role of questions in student learning is well recognized. However, the controversial issue of who should pose questions that direct inquiry continues: teachers or students? One perspective advocates that teachers generate questions as it assumes that students cannot generate high-quality questions. In contrast, Knowledge Building, a pedagogical...

Ontario's Leading Student Achievement Project aims to foster professional collaboration among principals, vice-principals, and teachers in order to build capacity for improving student achievement and well-being. During the 2017-2018 school year, a multi-level, multi-district KB network was initiated to spread Knowledge Building in elementary schoo...

It is not clear under what conditions do students ask repetitive questions and the possible effects of repetition on knowledge-building process. In this study, 18 groups of semantically similar questions were found in two online knowledge-building databases, and three patterns emerged: asking a similar question in advance of reading existing questi...

This study represents an attempt to uncover user profiles for productive engagement in knowledge building environments. In line with the Knowledge Building goal of re-creating schools as knowledge creating organizations, we reviewed the literature on productive forms of engagement in knowledge work in out-of-school contexts, and applied a Team Mana...

Working on students’ authentic problems is emphasized in Knowledge Building theory and pedagogy, as it is perceived that a failure to deal with such problems may result in a failure of knowledge building. This study is focused on questions students asked in a knowledge building environment, in order to examine how issues students cared enough about...

As collaborative learning is actualized through evolving dialogues, temporality inevitably matters for the analysis of collaborative learning. This study attempts to uncover sequential patterns that distinguish “productive” threads of knowledge-building discourse. A database of Grade 1–6 knowledge-building discourse was first coded for the posts’ c...

This research explores the ability of grade 2 students to engage in productive discussion about the state of their knowledge building using group-level feedback tools to support their metadiscourse. Two aspects of knowledge work were common to the comparison and experimental classes: “Knowledge Building talk” (KB talk) involving teacher-student dis...

This brief explains why divestment from fossil fuel companies is in keeping with the values of the university and why it is feasible and financially prudent. This document is laid out to do three things: 1. respond directly to the University of Toronto’s Policy on Social and Political Issues With Respect to University Divestment and Procedures for...

Temporality matters for analysis of collaborative learning. The present study attempts to uncover temporal patterns that distinguish "productive" threads of knowledge building inquiry. Using a rich knowledge building discourse dataset, in which notes' contribution types and threads' productivity have been coded, a secondary temporal analysis was co...

Knowledge creation depends on pursuit of promising possibilities. This paper reports a case study of a graduate-level course, with promisingness judgments incorporated as an explicit goal of course work. The top-level goal for the course was to have students take collective responsibility for "the creation of an assessment of collaborative knowledg...

This study examines the impact of formative feedback to enhance students' productive written vocabulary. Behavioral, lexical, and network structure analyses were applied to the work of two Grade 2 classes engaged in knowledge building in science. Two variations of feedback including vocabulary and contribution-based visualizations were integrated i...

The ability to identify promising ideas is an important but obscure and undeveloped aspect of knowledge building. The goal of this research was to examine the extent to which young students can make promisingness judgments and, as a result, engage in more effective knowledge building. Toward this end we embedded a design experiment in a Grade 3 cla...

Causal explanation is an essential part of both science and history. This means that a large part of knowledge in these areas only becomes useful to the extent that one understands how facts are connected causally. Assuming that most explaining is done interactively—that is, through dialogue—this research focuses on kinds of contributions students...

Knowledge creation requires identifying and pursuing promising ideas—ideas that in their nascent form may not seem like much but that with development could grow into something big. The goal of our research is to develop a tool to explore the concept of promisingness and "big ideas," especially elementary school students' ability to make "promising...

In 1993 Carey and Smith conjectured that the most promising way to boost students’ understanding of the nature of science is a “theory-­‐building approach to teaching about inquiry.” The research reported here tested this conjecture by comparing results from two Grade 4 classrooms that differed in their emphasis on and technological support for cre...

This study examined the historical reasoning of Grade 4 students exploring medieval times using a Knowledge Building approach and Knowledge Forum technology. Discursive analysis of student contributions was conducted according to six attributes of historical reasoning: contextualization, using substantive concepts, asking historical questions, usin...

This study examined the historical reasoning of Grade 4 students exploring medieval times using a Knowledge Building approach and Knowledge Forum technology. Discursive analysis of student contributions was conducted according to six critical aspects of historical reasoning: asking historical questions, contextualizing, argumentation, using substan...

The proposed research is a small study that will form part of a larger program broadly addressing new ways that education can strengthen a society's capacity to produce new knowledge. The focus of the research is on elementary school students' emergent ways of contributing to knowledge-building discourse. Based on the procedures of "Grounded Theory...