Knowledge-building Communities Research Articles

The "Classes on the net" research project: The involvement and opinion of parents

This paper focuses on the involvement of parents in the “Classes on the net” research project and their opinion and suggestions about this project. “Classes on the net” is a hybrid model, based on the idea of working with classrooms as Knowledge Building Communities This educational model can improve the management of small and isolated classes characterized by multigrade classes. In “Classes on the net”, delocalized classes aim to design a common disciplinary path involving student groups in parallel in the same activities by adapting calendars, spaces, and teacher roles. Teachers of delocalized classes share cooperative educational practices such as “pairs aidants/peer supporters”, “mentorat/mentoring” or “delocalized equipe” by using Video conferencing and Knowledge Forum.
 “Classes on the net” model was tested for the first time in Italy in the Abruzzo small schools in the school year 2020/2021. The experimentation involved 12 small schools, 11 digital animators, 31 teachers, and 6 observers (school principals). This experimentation did not originate during COVID-19 to address the issues that the pandemic generated but was planned and started before the advent of emergency, obviously, the experimentation was influenced by COVID-19. The present paper, after the literature review concerning remoteness and parenting in small and rural schools and home- school partnership in rural educational settings, will introduce the “Classes on the net” model and present the focus group result held with parents. The focus group took into consideration parent-school relationship, parents and information and communication technology, and the involvement of parents in the research project and their opinion about it.

Promoting Life Competences in the Knowledge Society: The Contribution of Knowledge Building Model for Educational Systems

This article analyzes the possibility of using the Knowledge Building model in schools to promote the skills and abilities indicated by the LifeComp framework. After placing the LifeComp framework in the current social and cultural context of the knowledge society, the principles of the Knowledge Building model are examined and the technological infrastructure to support it, Knowledge Forum, is presented. A hypothesis on how the design of a Knowledge Building community can promote the competences of the LifeComp Framework is proposed and research evidence to support the hypothesis is provided. Some implications of this analysis and recommended changes for educational institutions to pursue this perspective are then discussed.

Meeting Students Halfway: Materials in an Ideas-centered Classroom

This design case examines how the intended design for a Knowledge Building Communities (KBC) is altered by the learning spaces created by the students. The case is that of a grade six class as they instantiated the KBC approach while learning about flight. The design is analyzed in terms of Bielaczyc's Social Infrastructure Framework and Law's trials of strength that the design endured and in particular how the trial of model-building challenged the design. The discussion focuses on the challenge of maintaining a writing-centered design when materials are prevalent in the classroom and how generative pedagogical practices are required to adapt the design.

Learning from the knowledge builders: Student perspectives on the challenges of classroom Knowledge Building communities

Learning from the knowledge builders: Student perspectives on the challenges of classroom Knowledge Building communities

A Whole New Information World

This introductory article explores the interconnectedness of the articles in this issue through the lens of artificial intelligence (AI), bots, and other technologies. The articles presented in this issue strive to demonstrate how the library and information science (LIS) field uses AI to interrogate social conflicts, critically question our professional knowledge base, engage in localized community knowledge building, and create interactive maps to preserve cultural knowledge and decentralize Western metadata values in non-Western contexts. This introductory article is presented as a readerly and writerly response to those articles because, as an experiment, I have co-authored this piece using Google’s Bard, a recently released AI chatbot. Google’s Bard is a powerful tool that generates text, translates languages, writes creative content, and answers questions. In this editorial, I share my own experience using Bard to identify the implications of AI as a co-author of the text. I discuss its advantages (if any) and disadvantages, and I outline how AI could impact the future of the LIS field.

Assessing team creativity with multi-attribute group decision-making in a knowledge building community: A design-based research

Through a knowledge building reading of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, team creativity was fostered in a primary school class of 37 students. Four instructional iterations were conducted: real problem proposal with scaffolds, theme reading and deep inquiry, script writing and creative drama rehearsal, and theory building. Consensus assessment technology (CAT) was used to quantify 52 conceptual artifacts. To address subjectivity and a significant workload, a system for analyzing team creativity was developed on the basis of a scoring criterion and multi-attribute group decision-making by using two rounds of TOPSIS. The technique proved to be effective following its comparison with social network analysis. In addition, the results suggest that students’ team creativity increased in the knowledge building community.

Students’ Reflections on Knowledge Building Process and Scaffolding

Collaborative learning environments such as “knowledge building community” and “online learning community” have gained importance with the inclusion of new technologies in the education process. In order to provide active participation expected in these learning environments, scaffolds such as sentence openers and role assignments are used in order to support, guide and enrich students' knowledge building processes. In this study, it is aimed to examine the pre-service teachers' opinions about online collaborative knowledge building process and the scaffolds used in this process. Seventy-seven pre-service teachers participating in the study participated in the knowledge building process in four different groups, using different scaffolds and no scaffolds. In this process, students were asked to complete the knowledge building questionnaire consisting of 12 questions of five likert types and a semi-structured interview form consisting of 10 questions reflecting their own experiences. Qualitative research method was used in the research and the data were analyzed by content analysis. In addition, some descriptive statistics such as percentage frequency are included. It was observed that the opinions of the students about their experiences in the collaborative knowledge building process were mostly positive. The students mostly stated that “it is important to determine our goals and to plan our progress”. The students defined their contributions in the knowledge building process as the most “providing diversity of opinions”. In addition, the scaffolds used by pre-service teachers in the online collaborative knowledge building process and their reflections on the better quality knowledge building process were included and interpreted in the context of technology-supported education.

지식생산공동체로서의 위키 기반 지역화 수업 지원 플랫폼 개발 연구

Objectives This study aims to overcome the practical difficulties of regionalization instruction in elementary schools by designing and developing a Wiki-based platform to assist elementary school teachers' instruction design as a knowledge-building community.
 Methods To this end, this study applied a rapid prototyping methodology for dynamic interactions in the design, development, and evaluation process. First, We designed the platform by conducting a literature review and a needs analysis. Moreover, We developed the final platform through two formative cycles of prototype development and usability evaluation. Through the user experience analysis of the finally developed platform, the value and improvement points of the wiki-based regionalization instruction support platform were derived.
 Results The final platform is a wiki platform based on Java, allowing easy materials modification through WYSIWYG editing. It has functions such as discussion, history, and statistical information. The number of wiki articles in the area, which was about 300 initially, has more than doubled to 765. As a result of user experience analysis, the usefulness of this platform is to support the design of regionalization instruction for teachers, update regionalization materials, provide effective learning resources for students, supplement the limits of book-type materials, and provide the experience of collective intelligence. On the other hand, we also confirmed subsequent issues such as reflection of students' level, management quality of information, enhancement of information productivity, enhancement of interactivity between users, and expansion of participants.
 Conclusions This study is significant in that it provided practical support for the difficulties faced by teachers through using wikis as a knowledge-building community and that it derived meaningful suggestions that should be considered when designing wiki-based knowledge-building communities.

Preschool Teachers' Knowledge Building Community During a Crisis: An Integrative Culture, Identity, and Practice

Preschool Teachers' Knowledge Building Community During a Crisis: An Integrative Culture, Identity, and Practice

A Collaborative Experiment in Building Anti-Carceral Pedagogies

The authors outline their development of an abolitionist and anti-carceral syllabus, to be shared as a “model in process” for relational learning and activism. The article provides a number of resources intended as community knowledge building and the development of applied and community-based practices.

Developing and Comparing Indices to Evaluate Community Knowledge Building in an Educational Research Course

This paper implements a novel approach to analyzing the degree of Collective Cognitive Responsibility (CCR) in a Knowledge Building community, based on socioeconomic and scientometric measures. After engaging in Knowledge Forum (KF) discussions for one semester, 36 students identified impactful ideas in their portfolios, which were then used to develop their impact scores. These scores were then transformed and plotted along the Lorenz Curve and the Gini coefficient to visualize the degree of equidistribution of recognition in the community and, by extension, the degree of collective responsibility shared by members of the community. Additionally, students were classified into member roles based on the impact of their contributions, and we explored the flow of member roles across several discussion topics, based on Price’s model of scientific production. Our results show convergence between peers’ and teachers’ ratings of impactful contributions, which both point to medium levels of collective responsibility in the community. In short, on the one hand, this procedure shows its sensitivity to detect communities that could not comply with the CCR principle. On the other hand, we discuss the necessity of reflective evaluation to address the pedagogical challenge of fostering collective responsibility for knowledge advancement and empowering novel students to take charge of their knowledge work at the highest levels.

Exploring Pre-service Teachers' Democratizing Knowledge in a Knowledge Building Community: Indicators and Results

Exploring Pre-service Teachers' Democratizing Knowledge in a Knowledge Building Community: Indicators and Results

Fostering college students’ critical thinking skills through peer assessment in the knowledge building community

ABSTRACT Critical thinking is one of the core twenty-first century skills. This study designs the strategy of peer assessment based on the theory of knowledge building to improve a class of 33 undergraduate students’ critical thinking skills in one semester. The context of knowledge building has four phases—idea generation, idea connection, idea improvement, and rising above—which are iterated by three rounds of peer assessment. In this study, the dependent variable was critical thinking skills, and the independent variable was peer assessment. Data sources include critical thinking skills surveyed, peer comments on Knowledge Forum and grades scored by students. The results showed that (1) students’ critical thinking skills were significantly improved; (2) students’ reports have risen in peer assessment; and (3) students’ critical thinking skills are significantly correlated with peer assessment in the knowledge-building community with both peer comments and peer grades. The findings indicated that knowledge building created a positive culture for the promotion of critical thinking skills, comments that expressed strong disagreement could improve students’ critical thinking skills, and the formation of community knowledge played a substantial role in promoting students’ critical thinking skills.

'We go where we know': Reflections from Mobilizing for PrEP and Sexual Health (MobPrESH) - A peer-led PrEP education programme across England, for and by women and non-binary people.

Background:Pre-exposure prophylaxis is a highly effective method of HIV prevention but few women know about it, have access to it, or see it as relevant to them. In 2019, grassroots organization PrEPster piloted a peer-led intervention, MobPrESH (Mobilizing for Pre-Exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and Sexual Health), across three sites in England, to mobilize for PrEP and sexual health with communities of women and non-binary people most affected by HIV, including Black women and non-binary people, people of colour, migrants, and transgender (trans) women.Objectives:We aimed to explore the accessibility, feasibility, acceptability, and ‘fidelity’ of MobPrESH, from the perspectives of peer mobilizers and project staff.Methods:We conducted focus group discussions and qualitative interviews with nine peer mobilizers (most identified as Black cisgender (cis) women) and six project staff (including Black and white cis women and non-binary people). We analysed data thematically, iteratively, and inductively, informed by concepts of reproductive and social justice.Results:We present findings in five thematic areas: connecting and relating to situate sexual health discussions, navigating silence and stigma, connecting within and across communities, competing pressures and structural hostilities, and resources and continuity. Community knowledge-building about PrEP is a slow, iterative process that needs investment and creation of trusted spaces that centre communities’ needs and concerns. Peer mobilizers and the communities they engaged with had competing demands in their lives, and knowledge-raising about PrEP was impacted by intersecting stigmas, discrimination, and oppressions around HIV status, racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and anti-sex worker rhetoric.Conclusions:Peer-led PrEP interventions require funding and foregrounding, particularly for women and non-binary people who are Black, trans, migrants, and people of colour, situated relative to their wider health needs, life pressures, and priorities. This requires concurrent challenge of the racist and patriarchal structures that continue to obscure the sexual and reproductive health needs of racially minoritized and marginalized women and non-binary people.

An open source library to parse and analyze online collaborative knowledge-building portals

With the success of collaborative knowledge-building portals, such as Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, Quora, and GitHub, a class of researchers is driven towards understanding the dynamics of knowledge building on these portals. Even though collaborative knowledge building portals are known to be better than expert-driven knowledge repositories, limited research has been performed to understand the knowledge building dynamics in the former. This is mainly due to two reasons; first, unavailability of the standard data representation format, second, lack of proper tools and libraries to analyze the knowledge building dynamics.We describe Knowledge Data Analysis and Processing Platform (KDAP), a programming toolkit that is easy to use and provides high-level operations for analysis of knowledge data. We propose Knowledge Markup Language (Knol-ML), a generic representation format for the data of collaborative knowledge building portals. KDAP can process the massive data of crowdsourced portals like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow efficiently. As a part of this toolkit, a data-dump of various collaborative knowledge building portals is published in Knol-ML format. The combination of Knol-ML and the proposed open-source library will help the knowledge building community to perform benchmark analysis.Link of the repository: Verma et al. (2020)Video Tutorial: Verma et al. (2020)Supplementary Material: Verma et al. (2020)

Pedagogical Transformation and Teacher Learning for Knowledge Building: Turning COVID-19 Challenges into Opportunities

This paper reports on the continual effort of the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) connecting teachers within and across schools for knowledge creation and community building during the COVID-19 disruptions. During this crisis, schools around the world are challenged with the issues of implementing online learning. Three areas of misalignment were identified: disjoint in learning with home-school separation, piecemeal technologies to mimic physical teaching, and disconnect between teacher professional development and classroom practices and we discussed emerging realignment efforts for transformative learning. Through analyzing the three case examples of how teachers responded to COVID-19 challenges in inter-related areas of curriculum, pedagogy, technology and community, we identified several themes on emerging alignments conducive for transformative pedagogy and technology through community advancement. These themes include: innovating practice around the centrality of ideas; perceiving knowledge building as pervasive; transformative use of technology, and symmetrical advancement of knowledge. These case examples show that in these disruptive times, the teachers were more actively building new practices supported by community dynamics and systemic processes of the KBC. Consequently, the interactions between stakeholders shifted from disjointed relations in different hierarchical levels to a networked community of people, ideas, and resources, and teachers continually advancing their knowledge-building practice in these challenging times.

Enriching the informing cycle of Knowledge Building Communities by investigating students’ interpretations of design principles

ABSTRACT Knowledge Building Communities (KBCs) are principled-based, interactive learning environments designed to scaffold higher levels of student agency and the formulation of goals and questions stemming from students’ knowledge-building needs. The design of KBCs is guided by a set of 12 principles that have been examined across hundreds of studies. Although five studies have investigated students’ perspectives of knowledge building, none have analyzed their views with the primary aim of refining the current set of principles. Positioning students’ perspectives on KBCs based on their experiences can help democratize the KBC research process if they are embedded into a clear methodological approach that can persuasively contribute to an advancing body of knowledge. In this article, we report on findings from a qualitative analysis that compared participants’ views of the KBC approach with the elaborations that currently appear in the existing formulations of the complete set of KBC design principles. Our findings indicate that there is a great degree of overlap between participants’ perceptions and the existing elaborations, but also point to extensions and one new principle. We offer a preliminary model that can help refine the current KBC design principles, as well as suggest future work that can continue advancing them.

Guidance for wiki-supported collaborative learning and community knowledge building for an entire class: Enhancing learning environments during the COVID19 pandemic

El propósito de este estudio es desarrollar una teoría instruccional para el aprendizaje colaborativo apoyado por wiki en el contexto de proyectos de pequeños grupos para el desarrollo del conocimiento colaborativo en cursos de pregrado. El documento presenta la teoría instruccional desarrollada a través de dos implementaciones y analiza cómo esta teoría puede enriquecer el aprendizaje independientemente de las limitaciones durante la pandemia del COVID19, en la que las reuniones de grupos pequeños son posibles pero las reuniones de clases grandes se trasladan a educación en línea.
 
 Aunque, en teoría, los wikis deberían ser una tecnología poderosa para apoyar el aprendizaje colaborativo, la investigación empírica revela desafíos con respecto a la motivación del estudiante, la dinámica de grupo y la evaluación. Para cerrar las brechas entre la teoría y la práctica, utilizamos el enfoque de investigación basado en el diseño (DBR) y colaboramos con dos profesionales expertos para desarrollar la teoría de la instrucción. El proceso de investigación incluye una teoría inicial, implementaciones en dos casos y refinamiento de la teoría. La recopilación y el análisis de datos incluyen la revisión de la literatura, múltiples entrevistas individuales con expertos antes y durante las implementaciones, observaciones semanales de la clase, entrevistas de grupos focales con los estudiantes durante la implementación, análisis de contenido de los wikis de la clase y entrevistas de grupos focales con expertos para perfeccionar la teoría.
 
 Los resultados del estudio presentado en este documento se centran en la construcción de una teoría instruccional refinada, que a su vez se basa en el trabajo teórico, el conocimiento heurístico de los instructores expertos y la eficacia local. Además, este documento incluye principios de diseño con algunas consideraciones para apoyar el aprendizaje en entornos COVID19.
 En otras palabras, el éxito de usar wikis para fomentar una cultura de compartir y para aumentar la motivación y participación de los estudiantes en el trabajo de proyectos individuales o grupales, así como en la construcción de conocimiento comunitario para toda una clase, puede enriquecer el aprendizaje durante la pandemia al crear entornos de aprendizaje centrados en el alumno, en el conocimiento, en la evaluación y en la comunidad. The purpose of this stu­­­dy is to develop an instructional theory for scaffolding wiki-supported collaborative learning in small group projects and in collaborative knowledge development for undergraduate courses. The paper presents the instructional theory developed through two implementations and discusses how this instructional theory may enrich learning regardless of the constraints during the COVID19 pandemic, in which small-group meetings are possible but large-class meetings are moved online.
 Although, in theory, wikis should be a powerful technology to support collaborative learning, empirical research reveals challenges regarding student motivation, group dynamics, and assessment. To bridge the gaps between theory and practice, we used the design-based research approach (DBR) and collaborated with two expert practitioners to develop the instructional theory. The research process includes an initial theory, implementations in two cases, and theory refinement. Data collection and analysis involve literature review, multiple individual interviews with experts before and during implementations, weekly class observations, focus-group interviews with students during implementation, content analysis of class wikis, and focus-group interviews with experts for theory refinement.
 The results of the study presented in this paper focus on the refined instructional theory, which was grounded in theoretical work, expert instructors’ heuristic knowledge, and local effectiveness. In addition, this paper includes design principles with some considerations to support learning in COVID19 environments. In other words, the success of using wikis to foster a culture of sharing, and to increase student motivation and participation in individual or group project work, as well as in community knowledge building for an entire class, may enrich learning during the pandemic by creating learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, and community-centered learning environments.

Give student ideas a larger stage: support cross-community interaction for knowledge building

This study explores boundary-crossing interaction between two grade 5/6 science classrooms that operated as knowledge building communities. The two classrooms studied human body systems with the support of the Knowledge Forum over a ten-week period. The knowledge building practice integrated student-driven inquiry and discourse within each community and cross-community interaction mediated through “super notes” posted in a cross-community meta-space. Students co-authored super notes as epistemic boundary objects, each of which synthesized knowledge progress in an emergent line of inquiry for cross-community sharing. Qualitative analyses of classroom videos, online discourse, and interviews provide a rich description of how the students conceived, generated, and interacted with the super notes for knowledge building. The processes to transcend student ideas toward the higher social levels for sharing through boundary-crossing further served as a larger context for idea development toward higher epistemic levels. Incorporating cross-community interaction is important for scaling CSCL-based classroom practices in a way that fosters high-level epistemic engagement.

The role of the instructor and the tutor in the discoursive interaction in a blended university course: A case analysis

While a Knowledge Building community is a student-directed community, instructors play an important role, preparing the cultural, cognitive, and social conditions for the adoption of the Knowledge Building perspective. This study examines how a teaching team, including an instructor and a tutor, can facilitate knowledge building in a blended university course. More specifically, it aims to investigate the impact of the instructor’s and tutor’s interventions on student participation and the differences between them in terms of the quantity and quality of the interventions. The results show the impact of the teaching team interventions in the changes of the Specific Conversational Functions used by the students and highlight that instructor assumed the role of knowledge building activator, while the tutor is identified as a knowledge building facilitator. Practical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.