Knowledge Advancement in Environmental Science Through Knowledge Building

Abstract

This chapter describes how some students from a primary school learned environmental science as they were engaged in knowledge building (Scardamalia and Bereiter, Knowledge building. In: Guthrie JW (ed) Encyclopedia of education. Macmillan Reference, New York, pp 1370–1373, 2003) during a Nature Learning Camp (NLC) project. Unlike the emphasis on “doing” inquiry-based project work that tends to be task-oriented, knowledge building channels the attention of learners onto the continual advancement of conceptual ideas held by the group. By placing ideas at the center of their activity, knowledge building takes advantage of learner inquisitiveness to develop mature knowledge producers as he/she pushes up the level of understanding of self and the collective. In this chapter, we show this radical process of knowledge growth among six fifth-grade students (10–11 years old) in Singapore over a year as they investigated how meat rotted. We highlight three key features of knowledge building as a powerful learning strategy with this case example—idea improvement, conceptual artifacts, and collective effort and collaborative discourse. This idea-at-the-center activity resulted in knowledge that surpassed the initial problem the students had raised and started with. Moreover, it developed deeper scientific knowledge of decomposition as well as the spirit and skills of knowledge building among these young learners.