Abstract
Evaluating promisingness of ideas is an important but underdeveloped aspect of knowledge building. The goal of this research was to examine the extent to which Grade 3 students could make promisingness judgments to facilitate knowledge-building discourse. A Promising Ideas Tool was added to Knowledge Forum software to better support knowledge‐building discourse. The tool helped students select promising ideas from their group’s written online discourse and then aggregate and display selections to support collective decision making regarding most promising directions for subsequent work. Students knew in advance that their selections would influence the direction of group work, and through iterations of procedures came to better understand how individually selected ideas would become the focus of class discussions and next knowledge‐building efforts. The basic design was repeated over two cycles of promising-idea selections, discussions, and follow-up activity to refine ideas. Qualitative and quantitative results indicated that students as young as 8 years of age could make promisingness judgments benefiting their community. Through use of the Promising Ideas Tool and discussion based on results from its use, Grade 3 students achieved significantly greater knowledge advances than students not engaged in promisingness judgments and discussions.
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Notes
A Google search of “knowledge building” now returns almost a half million results. Since this term exists in many documents, we use lower case with the generic term and capitalize “Knowledge Building” when referring to the approach originating in our laboratory at the University of Toronto and promoted by organizations such as Knowledge Building International.
Original source is unknown. Quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Botero
A note is a basic unit of communication in Knowledge Forum, used by participants to contribute theories, explanations, designs, plans, evidence, authoritative sources, models, and so forth.
A Knowledge Forum view is a two-dimensional organization space for notes. Connections between notes, such as building on and referencing, are graphically displayed as links in the view.
It would be less meaningful to compare the experimental and comparison classes on SNA metrics because discourse spaces were organized dramatically differently in two classes. In particular, the experimental group had three “subviews” directly corresponding to three discourse phases; in contrast, the comparison class organized the Knowledge Forum space in subviews, which represented several discussion topics that students engaged with throughout the unit. In this case, it becomes impossible to partition social network data in the comparison class because social interactions were intertwined across phases. The experimental group did not have this problem because discourse phases corresponded with views.
In quotations from student notes, minor errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation that do not affect meaning are corrected.
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Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through generous support of teachers, administrators, and students at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study Laboratory School, University of Toronto and funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research titled “Ways of Contributing to Dialogue in Elementary School Science and History” and “Digitally-Mediated Group Knowledge Processes to Enhance Individual Achievement in Literacy and Numeracy.” We are grateful to ijCSCL reviewers for careful review.
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Chen, B., Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. Advancing knowledge‐building discourse through judgments of promising ideas. Intern. J. Comput.-Support. Collab. Learn 10, 345–366 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-015-9225-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-015-9225-z