Collaborative Knowledge Building: Preservice Teachers and Elementary Students Talking to Learn

Abstract

Two target groups, one composed of six preservice teachers and one of six Grade 5/6 students, are videotaped as they meet over a six-month period to conduct their collaborative groupwork. We take a socio-constructivist stance towards knowledge building, and as such, we are interested in how students collaboratively assist one another by pushing for deeper understanding and relating back to what the group already knows. Groups are given strategies to help them develop working norms and discourse structures in an effort to promote inquiry. We argue for a distinction between argument for inquiry and argument for persuasion in order to assess knowledge-building collaboration discourse. Language and social issues are addressed along with the cognitive issues of managing problem finding and problem solving. Analyses suggest that as the Grade 5/6 group learned to discuss and argue ideas explicitly as a means of inquiry they were better able to help each other advance their understanding. The preservice teachers, on the other hand, showed no such shift. This counter-intuitive result is discussed in terms of the students' differing concept of the task and the role devotional discourse may have in induction into a profession. Educational implications are also explored.