Designing collaborative knowledge building environments accessible to all learners: Impacts and design challenges

Abstract

The present study attempted to investigate whether young learners who were new to knowledge building approaches could work towards advancing both individual and collective knowledge, and whether knowledge building could be beneficial to both high-achieving and low-achieving students. Findings reported in this paper are from one and a half-year design research for science learning in one primary school in Singapore. In this study, we closely examined the design and enactment of the Knowledge Building Community model in one class with high-achieving students and two classes with mixed-ability students. The research consists of two phases: Phase I Cultivating a collaborative knowledge building culture and Phase II Progressive Knowledge Building using Knowledge Forum. Data were collected from multiple sources, including knowledge assessment, conceptual understanding tasks, and the content analysis of Knowledge Forum postings. The results in Phase I show that while it is critical for students to monitor and build knowledge for their own understanding, they had difficulties developing such skills. In both phases, we found positive impacts on academic achievements showing improvement of student understanding in the course of reflective thinking and progressive inquiry. Overall, quantitative data suggest that the collaborative knowledge building environment was beneficial for both high-achieving and low-achieving students. We conclude by discussing some of challenges and issues in designing collaborative knowledge building environments for young learners with diverse abilities.

Introduction

In the past decade, there have been on-going discussions on what students need to learn to be competent in the knowledge-based society. Obviously, the knowledge and skills required in this new age are very different from those emphasized in the old age. Knowing vast factual information is not enough since people should also know how to apply their knowledge to complex situations. This necessitates gaining deep understanding and problem-solving skills. Additionally, a knowledge-based society needs people who can work collaboratively and creatively with critical thinking and adaptive expertise. This presents educators with a challenging task: re-designing learning environments into a knowledge-centered community where learners work collaboratively toward the advancement of knowledge (Bereiter, 2002).

Diversity is another critical issue in current education. Today, classrooms in Singapore include students from a diversity of linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds. Many students do not have English as their first language, and a number of students have difficulty with basic academic skills. Schools face a challenging task in providing adequate instruction to meet the diverse needs of students. Traditional didactic teaching methods have not provided sufficient learning opportunities to students who need additional academic supports. Indeed, reform initiatives to decrease academic gaps among students have been a constant part of restructuring educational systems in several countries. For instance, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in the United States outlined radical changes and directions to provide high-quality education to improve the academic achievement of all students, especially those from non-English speaking and low-income families (Linn, 2003). In Singapore primary schools, the Learning Support Programme (LSP) was implemented as an early intervention language and literacy program to provide additional support to students in Primary 1 and 2 levels. However, since these classes do not extend beyond Primary 2, students who have achieved the minimum requirements at that level subsequently have to learn to cope on their own without the benefits of additional lessons, regardless of their coping abilities.

Recognizing such needs and challenges for current education in Singapore, we aimed to design a knowledge building environment where deep learning is promoted through progressive collaborative inquiry, and where learning is accessible to a wide range of students. The focus was on shifting from being able to remember information to being able to learn with understanding. Additionally, it is our opinion that no students should be left behind, and that schools should provide them with appropriate tools and resources for the improvement of learning. Furthermore, we support previous learning sciences research suggesting that an important reason why students in many cases have difficulty with academic knowledge and understanding is not simply because they lack intellectual abilities, but rather because they do not know how to learn, how to inquire, how to collaborate, and how to reflect (Bransford et al., 1999, Vosniadou et al., 2001, White and Frederiksen, 1998).

For the design of deep learning environments accessible to all learners, we have adopted and implemented a pedagogical model called a Knowledge Building Community (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1991, Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1994, Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006) that focuses on shifting classrooms from a teacher-directed place with a task-oriented culture to a student-centered place with a collective inquiry culture. Knowledge building, a well-established research area for the past two decades, can be “defined as the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community, through means that increase the likelihood that what the community accomplishes will be greater than the sum of individual contributions and part of broader cultural efforts” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003, p. 1370).

Knowledge building exploits both the social and technological affordances of the community knowledge. On the social dimension, it relies on collaborative learning which has been shown to be more effective than traditional whole-class methods of teaching (Abrami & Bures, 1996; Johnson and Johnson, 1999, Slavin, 1995). Premised on the concepts of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and constructivism, knowledge building theory propounds that learning is essentially a social process, a situated activity in which a community of learners collaboratively build upon each other’s knowledge, adding to the communal knowledge pool, through discourse and discussion. On the technological dimension, an asynchronous discussion platform called Knowledge Forum (formerly CSILE) allows many-to-many communication. This online learning environment seeks to capture the discourse of the learners as they make collective inquiries into a specific topic, and work towards a deeper understanding through interactive questioning, dialogue and continuous idea improvement.

In the knowledge building classroom, learners treat new knowledge or information as something problematic that needs to be explained (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993, Chan et al., 1997). Teachers act as facilitators of knowledge building, guiding learners to engage in extended questioning and explanation-driven inquiry. Learners engage collaboratively in improving shared knowledge artifacts, such as hypotheses, theories, explanations, and interpretations. On the whole, the knowledge building process empowers student initiatives and reduces domination by teachers. The Knowledge Building Community model also addresses issues in student diversities. As the diversity of ideas and democratizing knowledge are central for the collective cognitive responsibility (Scardamalia, 2002), students with different backgrounds and abilities are encouraged to participate in the knowledge building process to create a pool of diverse ideas.

Despite the fact that knowledge building research in the past decades has shown the great impacts of student agency for deep learning (e.g., Hewitt, 2001, van Aalst and Chan, 2007, Yoon, 2008, Zhang et al., 2007), there are still a number of barriers regarding how teachers perceive knowledge building approaches. One of them is a pervasive conception that knowledge-building activities are only suitable for certain students, especially those with higher cognitive abilities (Chan & Lee, 2007). This common belief has been identified as a barrier not only in knowledge building research, but also in other research attempting to promote more student agency and responsibility in learning.. For instance, Zohar and Dori (2003) argue that teachers with these fixed beliefs about student abilities tend to use higher-order tasks for high-achieving students more often than for low-achieving students. The consequences of this practice are obvious: low-achieving students are deprived of opportunities to develop higher-order thinking skills, and thus the gap among students becomes wider over time. About three decades ago, Vygotsky (1978) expressed the similar concern about deprived learning opportunities in the discussion of the Zone of Proximal Development. When criticizing teaching practices focusing on concrete thinking and suppressing the development of abstract thinking, Vygotsky argued that concreteness should be seen “only as a stepping stone for developing abstract thinking-as a means, not as an end in itself”(p. 89).

When teachers’ epistemological beliefs that “high-ability students can do well always, but low-ability students need more direct instruction”, or “my students are too young to learn with technology” are pervasive (quotes from the first author’s field notes), realizing the Knowledge Building Community becomes more difficult. We acknowledge that whether knowledge building or similar pedagogical approaches emphasizing student agency work for diverse learners is not a simple question to answer, as in many cases of educational research. We argue, however, that what is more important for the advancement of our knowledge is to examine how knowledge building works for students with different academic abilities, and if any differences exist, to seek ways to improve learning environments in order to reduce such gaps.

Toward this end, this paper reports our efforts in designing such knowledge building learning environments accessible to diverse learners. Findings are from one and a half-year design research for science learning in one primary school in Singapore. Specifically, this paper presents the design, implementation, and impact related to the following two research questions:

• What are the impacts of collaborative knowledge building environments on students’ advancement of knowledge? Are the environments beneficial for both high- and low-achieving students?

• What are the design challenges of creating collaborative knowledge building environments for young learners’ science learning that are accessible to diverse learners?

For design and analysis, we employed design research (Brown, 1992, Collins et al., 2004) as a methodological approach, and attempted to make progressive changes and refinements, from cultivating a collaborative knowledge building culture to deepening Progressive Knowledge Building inquiry as outlined below:

• Phase I Cultivating a collaborative knowledge building culture: The main purpose of this phase was to build a collaborative knowledge building culture in classrooms prior to introducing Knowledge Forum as a technological tool.

• Phase II Progressive Knowledge Building using Knowledge Forum: The main focus of the second phase was to facilitate collaborative knowledge building through the use of a technological tool called Knowledge Forum.

The paper is structured into three parts. First, previous research relevant to the current project is briefly reviewed to highlight issues and tensions associated with designing knowledge building environments for promoting the advancement of knowledge and making it accessible to all learners. Second, findings for each research question are presented with descriptions about data collection and analysis, and results. Finally, we discuss implications of our findings for future research on designing collaborative knowledge building environments accessible to all learners.