Abstract
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 to provide a public and collaborative space for continual improvement of ideas. A new analytic tool—inquiry threads—was developed to analyze the discourse used by these students as they worked in this environment. Data analyses focus on four knowledge building principles: idea improvement; real ideas, authentic problems (involving concrete/empirical and abstract/conceptual artifacts); community knowledge (knowledge constructed for the benefit of the community as a whole); and constructive use of authoritative sources. Results indicate that these young students generated theories and explanation-seeking questions, designed experiments to produce real-world empirical data to support their theories, located and introduced expert resources, revised ideas, and responded to problems and ideas that emerged as community knowledge evolved. Advances were reflected in progress in refining ideas and evidence of growth of knowledge for the community as a whole. Design strategies and challenges for collective idea improvement are discussed.
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Notes
The italicized words in this section represent basic features of Knowledge Forum referred to throughout this article.
A comment might be scored in more than one category.
Students tended to exclude inquiry themes at the periphery of their inquiries from their portfolio notes, for example, worms sense light, seasons, power of light (can light move small stuffs?), electric light, the sun and stars, etc.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by an “Initiative on the New Economy” Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (512-2002-1016). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 2005, Montreal. We extend our thanks to Carl Bereiter, Jan van Aalst, Nancy Law, and the editor and anonymous reviewers for their input, to Chris Teplovs and Chew Lee Teo for their assistances in data analyses. We are particularly indebted to the students, teachers, and principal of the Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, for the insights, accomplishments and research opportunities enabled by their work.
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Zhang, J., Scardamalia, M., Lamon, M. et al. Socio-cognitive dynamics of knowledge building in the work of 9- and 10-year-olds. Education Tech Research Dev 55, 117–145 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-006-9019-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-006-9019-0