Richard Messina

• University of Toronto

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of principle-based analytic tools to improve community knowledge building in a class of Grade 5/6 students. A flexible design framework was used to engage students in use of three analytic tools - a Vocabulary Analyzer, a Social Network Tool, and a Semantic Overlap Tool. These tools are built into Kno...

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...

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...

Abstract in italiano Il presente articolo si propone di ricostruire la genesi del modello Knowledge Building (KB), descriverne l’assetto attuale e delinearne i possibili ulteriori sviluppi. Vengono presi in considerazione in primo luogo, a partire dallo scenario culturale di riferimento, i temi teorici che, pur configurandosi nel lavoro di Bereiter...

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 elaborates collaborative productivity as self-sustaining processes along with the role of the teacher in a knowledge building community. The participants were 22 fourth-graders, who investigated light over a three-month period facilitated by a veteran teacher with the support of Knowledge Forum®. Content analysis of the students' portfol...

See full text with open access at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10508400802581676 This article reports a design experiment conducted over three successive school years, with the teacher's goal of having his Grade 4 students assume increasing levels of collective responsibility for advancing their knowledge of optics. Classroom prac...

The Knowledge Age brings with it the need for a new form of educational wisdom-wisdom about knowledge. It is generally believed that it takes a long time to achieve wisdom. If that is true, the best schools can do is start students on a long progression-but a progression toward what? What represents a good or bad start on wisdom? Knowledge-Age wisd...

Principle-based pedagogical and technological designs were used to support knowledge building in a grade 5-6 class. Pedagogical designs focused on collective responsibility for knowledge advancement. Technological designs focused on provision of a public space for generating and continually improving ideas with (a) social-network-analysis tools to...

This study examines four months of online discourse of 22 Grade 4 students engaged in efforts to advance their understanding of optics. Their work is part of a school-wide knowledge building initiative, the essence of which is giving students collective responsibility for idea improvement. This goal is supported by software—Knowledge Forum—designed...

This paper describes how a fourth grade class at a Canadian laboratory school used an approach to knowledge building that had students participating as intentional learners as they specialized in interest groups for their study of light. It examines how, later in the year, the goal of building collective knowledge became the focus for this group of...