Search

This study explores the dynamic, interactive nature of digital drawings and writing in a knowledge building community in which students used a multimedia online environment—Knowledge Forum—to represent and advance ideas in the field of optics. The research employs a mixed-methods case study to collect and analyze multimedia notes created by 22 fourth-grade students. Graphical notes—notes containing drawings—included more idea units and more sophisticated ideas than non-graphical notes. Quality of drawing also correlated with idea improvement in Knowledge Forum notes, with ratings of idea improvement based on conceptual understanding of optics. Overall, findings revealed significant advantages of online drawing for Grade 4 students, with case-study analysis revealing the many ways in which graphics complement writing and contribute to knowledge building.

Knowledge building is an innovative pedagogy aiming to transform students into expert-like knowledge workers. The purpose of this study was to foster teacher-education students’ design performance (i.e., observation, synthesis, ideation and prototypes) in a knowledge-building environment. The participants were 38 college students from a Taiwanese university. They were randomly assigned to eight groups. Each group used the Knowledge Forum—a computer-supported collaborative knowledge-building environment—to develop and discuss the design products of their choice. Data analysis focused on the groups’ online knowledge-building activities, online design thinking processes, and the relationship between them. In general, knowledge-building activities facilitated students’ design thinking. Specifically, we considered the extent to which student groups’ sustained online engagement and increased knowledge had a major impact on their design performance. Ways of applying knowledge-building principles to foster effective design processes are discussed.

Teacher's reflective capacity is an important means for teachers' growth in professionalism. This design-based research investigated the effects of knowledge building (KB) principles on pre-service teachers' reflective capacity in two intervention cycles. Particularly, the two principles of “community knowledge, collective responsibility” and “symmetric knowledge advancement” were highlighted. Participants include 25 pre-service teachers who practiced their micro-teaching during two intervention cycles. Data include: (1) records of online activities; (2) content of online feedback in the form of lesson design ideas; and (3) two open-ended surveys. Findings based on the first intervention cycle revealed that guided by the first KB principle, the participants were able to progressively work more cohesively as an online collaborative community, and extend their reflective concerns about teaching to learning. However, there was no significant improvement in terms of the quality of feed-backed lesson design ideas. To address this issue, the second principle was added in the second design cycle. Moreover, using survey as a reflection tool, an attempt to extend the investigation from pre-service teachers' reflection on teaching concerns to reflection on technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) was taken into consideration in the second intervention iteration. As a result, the quality of the feed-backed lesson design ideas was significantly improved, indicating a sign of pre-service teachers' enhanced design fluency. In addition, the participants' design knowledge was also improved as evidenced in their deepening their reflection from basic, to more integrated, TPACK knowledge. Implications regarding principle-based, design-oriented knowledge building activities to foster reflective thinking for teacher preparation are discussed.

STEM learning is an integrated approach to improving learners’ problem-solving capacity and 21st-century skills by engaging them in systematic investigation that requires interdisciplinary knowledge. This study aimed to examine whether the design of an innovative knowledge-building environment facilitates STEM learning. Participants were university students engaging in in-depth group projects to design a piece of living-technology product. Data were obtained from student groups’ online discussion of their STEM projects. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of student groups’ knowledge-building activities, including fostering a strong sense of community, working productively with ideas, and assuming higher-level agency, provided evidence of students’ deep engagement in the design of their STEM projects. Recommendations for the design of effective STEM learning environments are offered.

This study investigated teacher-education students' development of adaptive mathematics teaching practices and beliefs in an online knowledge building environment under principle-based design guidance. Participants were students who took a university course titled Middle-School Mathematics Teaching over a year. Data analyses focused on (a) students' collaborative lesson design activities as documented in an online database, (b) students' video-taped teaching practices, and (c) students’ mathematical beliefs using a survey. Correspondingly, the results indicate that the principle-based design guidance (a) was conducive in promoting reflective and collaborative knowledge work in the online community, (b) was likely to motivate the participants to progressively practice more adaptive teaching, and (c) facilitated their development towards more constructivist-oriented mathematical beliefs.

This study investigated the effects of two different pedagogical approaches on the development of college students’ innovation-oriented cultural views. First, an initial cultural view survey (n = 1...

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’ contribution types and discussion threads’ productivity. Two distinctive temporal analysis techniques – Lag-sequential Analysis (LsA) and Frequent Sequence Mining (FSM) – were subsequently applied to detecting sequential patterns among contribution types that distinguish productive threads. The findings of LsA indicated that threads that were characterized by mere opinion-giving did not achieve much progress, while threads having more transitions among questioning, obtaining information, working with information, and theorizing were more productive. FSM further uncovered from productive threads distinguishing frequent sequences involving sustained theoriz...

Exploring students' epistemic views is important as it should help to better understand how they acquire and work with knowledge. This case study investigated how college students' epistemic views relate to their collaborative inquiry activities in an online knowledge-building environment. Findings based on a mixed-method analysis on students' online discourse and open-ended survey questions suggested that students' knowledge-building activities were positively related to the development of their epistemic views. In particular, when students were able to engage in more productive and effective group inquiry activities, they were more likely to develop a more sophisticated epistemic view that was conducive to sustained idea improvement for advancing knowledge. The study has implications for understanding how students’ views on the nature of knowledge creation and the manner in which collaborative inquiry is conducted in an online environment affect each other.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among students’ conceptions of knowledge building, approaches to knowledge building, knowledge-building behaviors and learning outcomes. A total of 48 primary school students (from grades 3 and 4) who had experienced knowledge-building activities participated in the present study. After analyzing the students’ interview responses using the phenomenographic method, qualitatively different and hierarchically related conceptions and approaches were revealed. The results indicated that the students with fragmented conceptions tended to use surface approaches to knowledge building while those with cohesive conceptions tended to adopt deep approaches. The findings also indicate that the students with cohesive conceptions or deep approaches were more likely to have better learning outcomes than those with fragmented conceptions or surface approaches.

The purpose of this study was to explore how knowledge building could support the generation of creative ideas among college students and accordingly foster their creativity. The study was conducted in Knowledge Forum (KF), a knowledge building environment, where students were encouraged to engage in idea-centered activities. Participants were 38 college students and data mainly came from students’ online activities in KF, and a pre–post test concerning creativity. The results indicate that (1) students’ divergent thinking skills were improved after taking this course; (2) students were able to generate more promising ideas and progressively build on one another’s ideas toward the end of the course; and (3) students’ performance in KF is also positively correlated with their higher-level creative skills. Overall, this study demonstrates that knowledge building activities were useful to enhance student creativity.

In this article we review the Knowledge-Building literature, unpacking its conceptual framework, principle-based pedagogy, distinctive features, and issues regarding scalability and sustainability. The Knowledge-Building goal is to reframe education as a knowledge-creating enterprise, engaging students from the earliest years of schooling. Despite a 30-year program of research and development and recognition that there is a close fit between Knowledge Building and efforts to meet knowledge society needs, Knowledge Building is frequently reinterpreted along the general lines of bringing constructivist learning into schooling rather than means to reframing education as a knowledge-creating enterprise. This article aims to clarify Knowledge-Building goals and to make the opportunities afforded by Knowledge Building more accessible.

In the digital age, reading literacy, and particularly, higher-level reading comprehension involved in making sense of information from multiple sources online is an important educational challenge. This study explores designs for teaching reading to third graders in Taiwan. Over the course of a semester, the experimental group engaged in an innovative technology-supported approach called Knowledge Building (KB), while the comparison group engaged in the traditional approach of direct instruction. Statistical analyses reveal that students in the KB class outperformed their counterparts on the PIRLS reading assessment at the end of the semester. Additional quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that the use of Knowledge Forum technology in the KB class supported the development of higher-level reading comprehension skills through sustaining creative, collaborative work with ideas. Implications for teaching new literacies and digital competencies in computer-supported collaborative learning environments are discussed.

The creation of effective knowledge-building environments (KBEs) to help learners develop essential skills in a knowledge society has gradually been recognized as an important goal in education (see the review by Chen & Hong, 2016), but the qualities that teachers require to develop KBEs remain to be investigated. Drawing on a review of relevant literature, we hypothesized that constructivist teaching beliefs (CTBs) and technology-integration knowledge (TIK) would prove important determinants of teachers' potential to develop KBEs. The main aim of this study was to test a structural equation model encompassing teachers' CTBs and TIK, and determine whether these variables were reliable predictors of teachers' potential to develop KBEs. A convenience sample of 390 middle-school teachers was selected from northern Taiwan for this survey study. Our results allowed us to construct a path model and indicate that CTBs, which are positively mediated by TIK, facilitate teachers' potential to develop KBEs. The implications for teacher training are discussed.

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 Knowledge Forum technology so principle-based assessment is integral to knowledge work. The primary source of data was discourse generated by students in Knowledge Forum over a school semester (approximately four months). Findings based on a mixed-methods analysis reveal principle-based knowledge building analytic tools to be effective in increasing the frequency with which key terms are used by individuals, in their own productive vocabulary as well as in the shared community space, thus creating a more discursively connected community. Results additionally show a shift from problem generation and breadth of inquiry to increased self-assessment, reflection, and depth of inquiry; also, students report significant ways in which knowledge building analytic tools can increase knowledge building capacity. The effect of principle-based analytic tools to inform knowledge building was examined.Principle-based design (PBD) favors emergent goals and self-organization sustained by adaptive procedures.PBD supports more collaborative and adaptive use of analytic tools.Adaptive tool use is effective in creating a more discursively connected community.

This study investigates whether engaging college students (n = 42) in a knowledge building environment would help them work as a community to construct their collective knowledge of history of science and, accordingly, develop a more informed scientific view. The study adopted mixed-method analyses and data mainly came from surveys and student online discourse recorded in a database. Findings indicate that students’ knowledge building activities were conducive to the development of their online collaboration as a learning process and the effective collective knowledge work concerning natural science history as a learning outcome. Moreover, students were able to attain a more constructivist-oriented epistemic view that sees scientific theories as invented, tentative, and improvable objects. Finally, based on course reflection, students also regarded their collective learning experiences in this course as meaningful and productive.

This study examined preservice teachers' conceptions about creative teaching via knowledge-building activities. It also identifies the underlying challenges/barriers faced by preservice teachers for engaging in creative teaching. The data collected were from two surveys and a follow-up in-depth interview. Findings indicate that while the participants' teaching conceptions were highly constructivist-oriented, they did not readily perceive knowledge-building activities as feasible.

This study aimed to develop a knowledge-building environment scale (KBES). Based on the knowledge building pedagogy, the authors identified three core dimensions that could reflect the creative extent of knowledge building environment in the classrooms. Three independent samples were recruited to validate the reliability and validity of the scale. First, sample A (n = 332) was used to generate the factors through exploratory analysis. It resulted in a scale of three factors which contained “working with ideas,” “assuming agency” and “fostering community” dimensions. Second, a series of competing models were established and evaluated by confirmatory factor analysis through sample B (n = 575). The comparison shows that the hierarchical model was the most efficient model with good reliability and validity. Finally, the cross-validation of the hierarchical model was tested by sample C (n = 575) to confirm its stability and predictive power. The result of the KBES can provide institutions that are interested in promoting knowledge building with a tool for evaluating the learning environments.

This study investigates ways of using key terms to represent and assess community knowledge in an online knowledge building environment. Knowledge Forum - an environment specially designed to support advances in community knowledge - incorporates key-term analytic tools. In the current study these tools were used to determine if key-term measures complement conventional online behavioral measures in assessing community knowledge advances. Discourse rated as more reflective and depth-oriented showed higher percentages of shared key terms and higher frequency use of shared key terms than less reflective, shallower discourse. Limitations and possibilities for using key terms for automated assessment and visual representation of community knowledge are discussed.

This study explored the effects of student engagement in a knowledge-building (KB) environment on their collaborative learning process and the perceived creative climate of that environment. The participants were 30 college students who undertook a living technology course in which KB were employed. The main data sources include students’ online discourse and a creative climate questionnaire. The findings indicate that the students became progressively more collaborative and productive over time, and they also tended to perceive the climate of the learning environment as highly supportive of knowledge creation. Implications for designing creative learning environments are discussed.

In recent years, there have been many exchanges of perspectives and debates in the field of conceptual change. Most of the classical views on conceptual change have been criticized, and there have been recent discussions around bridging the cognitive and socio-cultural approaches in the research on conceptual change. On the other hand, researchers and educators in the knowledge building communities have been working towards advancing the frontier of knowledge work and knowledge creation in education in order to cope with the challenges of an emerging knowledge society. In this paper, we examine some of the main principles of knowledge building in relation to fostering conceptual change with reference to specific examples. Specifically, we highlight the foundational goal of knowledge building with respect to conceptual change.

This study explored how students viewed the role of ideas for knowledge work and how such view was related to their inquiry activities. Data mainly came from students’ online interaction logs, group discussion and inquiry, and a survey concerning the role of ideas for knowledge work. The findings suggest that knowledge building was conducive to developing among students a more informed view of ideas that sees ideas as improvable, real-world objects for collaborative and creative knowledge work, rather than merely as abstract thoughts for achieving an individual’s own knowledge acquisition. Moreover, it was found that how a group views the role of ideas was associated with how they improve the quality of the ideas during their group inquiry.

This study explores Knowledge Building as a principle-based innovation at an elementary school and makes a case for a principle- versus procedure-based approach to educational innovation, supported by new knowledge media. Thirty-nine Knowledge Building initiatives, each focused on a curriculum theme and facilitated by nine teachers over eight years, were analyzed using measures of student discourse in a Knowledge Building environment–Knowledge Forum. Results were analyzed from the perspective of student, teacher, and principal engagement to identify conditions for Knowledge Building as a school-wide innovation. Analyses of student discourse showed interactive and complementary contributions to a community knowledge space, conceptual content of growing scope and depth, and collective responsibility for knowledge advancement. Analyses of teacher and principal engagement showed supportive conditions such as shared vision and trust in student competencies to the point of enabling transfer of agency for knowle...

This study investigated the effects of engaging students to collectively learn and work with knowledge in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment called Knowledge Forum on their views about knowledge building theory and practice. Participants were 24 teacher-education students who took a required course about theory and practice in teaching. Data mainly came from (1) student discourse recorded in a Knowledge Forum database, (2) a survey that examined students' views about knowledge building, and (3) interviews with regard to students' perceived barriers to implementing knowledge building theory in teaching. Findings suggest that with sustained discourse to construct their collective understanding of the relationships between theory and practice in teaching for a semester, the participants were able to attain more informed and practical views about knowledge building theory. In addition, students' perceived barriers to implementing knowledge building in teaching were identified and strategies to help overcome these barriers discussed.

While the importance of viewing learning as knowledge creation is gradually recognized (Paavola et al. Computer-supported collaborative learning: foundations for a CSCL community 2002; Rev Educ Res 74:557–576 2004), an important question remains to be answered—what represents an effective instructional design to support collaborative creative learning? This paper argues for the need to move away from efficiency-oriented instructional design to innovation-oriented instructional design if learning as knowledge creation is to be pursued as an important instructional goal. The rationale in support of this argument is discussed from four different theoretical perspectives and an idea-centered, principle-based design approach as an example is proposed for discussion.

With the rapid development of ICT in education, demand for teachers to be able to design ICT-infused lessons is also on the rise. As such, preservice teachers need to be equipped with design-thinking skills so that they can design effective lessons. This chapter discusses the relationships between design thinking and preservice teacher preparation. It then examines two case studies that focus on promoting Taiwanese preservice teachers’ design-thinking capacity with the help of an innovative pedagogical approach called knowledge building. Potentials and challenges associated with knowledge-building practices for fostering design thinking among preservice teachers are discussed.

This study investigated effects of engaging teacher-education students in knowledge building on their teaching beliefs for mathematics. The data include a belief survey, student discourses recorded in an online database, and student teaching practices that were videotaped. Results indicated that the teaching practice of teacher-education students generally became more adaptive, their teaching strategies became progressively diversified, and, more importantly, their mathematics teaching beliefs became more constructivist centered.

This study examined growth in graphical literacy for students contributing to an online, multimedia, communal environment as they advanced their understanding of biology, history and optics. Their science and history studies started early in Grade 3 and continued to the end of Grade 4; students did not receive instruction in graphics production, nor were they required to produce graphics. Results show that students spontaneously produced graphics that advanced along seven dimensions, including effective representation of complex ideas, use of source information and captions, and aesthetic quality. On average, the scores for the seven dimensions were higher for Grade 4 students with two years of experience with Knowledge Building pedagogy and technology (Knowledge Forum®) than for Grade 6 students with one year of experience. The overall pattern of results suggests reciprocal enhancement of graphical, textual, digital, and scientific literacy, with students exceeding expectations by available norms, and performance enhanced through extended Knowledge Building experience.

Previous research indicates that epistemological beliefs are related to learning in various ways and have implications for teaching. This study further investigates whether it is possible to change teacher-education students' epistemological beliefs by engaging them in a constructivist way of collaborative knowledge building and learning in an online environment called Knowledge Forum. Findings indicate that Knowledge Forum as a knowledge-building environment is helpful in (1) engaging students in their online knowledge work; (2) making them more collaborative and reflective in the community; and (3) shifting their epistemological and pedagogical beliefs to become more constructivist-oriented.

This paper explores knowledge building in a community identified by Bielaczyc and Collins (2006) as a hotbed community--a community in which knowledge creation has taken on a life of its own. The practices of six elementary schoolteachers are analyzed to inform the development of teachers' knowledge-building practices and to better understand how teachers develop and sustain innovative knowledge-building practices.

This paper compares the effectiveness of two multimedia environments-- Blackboard Learning System™ and Knowledge Forum™--in terms of their underlying design approaches to support collaborative learning and knowledge work. The two design approaches are (1) a conventional theme-based approach, i.e., to center group collaboration and meaning interaction around themes, and (2) an idea-centered approach, i.e., to center group collaboration and meaning interaction around sustained idea exchange and improvement. Findings suggest that an idea-centered design approach seems more likely to construct an environment that fosters more dynamic group and meaning interactions, thus enabling more sustained collaborative learning and knowledge building.