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The relationship between group adoption of Knowledge Building Principles and performance in creating artifacts

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Abstract

Knowledge Building is a socio-constructivist approach that aims to engage students in a knowledge-creation environment as early as possible to get them ready for the knowledge society. Rather than following fixed procedures or scripts, the twelve Knowledge Building Principles, such as collective responsibility, real ideas and authentic problems, and improvable ideas, have framed the Knowledge Building approach. These principles support teachers and students to identify and work on their needs to improve the coherence and explanatory power of their community knowledge. We hypothesize that the extent to which students adopt these principles influence their group Knowledge Building. We analyzed the online discourse, design artifacts, and reflection of 39 pre-service teachers. We found that the participants did well in contributing diverse ideas, engaging in Knowledge Building discourse, taking initiatives in their groups, and considering each other as legitimate contributors. However, they needed support to use authoritative sources, assess their discourse and knowledge status, rise above diverse ideas to achieve new syntheses, and make complementary contributions across teams. Principles such as improvable ideas, embedded and transformative assessment, democratizing knowledge and symmetric knowledge advancement tend to distinguish the high-performance groups from the medium- and low-performance groups. This study implies the importance of teachers and researchers to help students engage in productive Knowledge Building using the twelve Knowledge Building Principles.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China under Grant Number 13YJA880004. The authors are indebted to the participants who made this research possible and the editor and reviewers who greatly helped strengthen this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Business School, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

    Shaoming Chai

  2. Department of Human Development, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Gaoxia Zhu

  3. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 1V6, Canada

    Gaoxia Zhu

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  1. Shaoming Chai
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Correspondence to Gaoxia Zhu.

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Chai, S., Zhu, G. The relationship between group adoption of Knowledge Building Principles and performance in creating artifacts. Education Tech Research Dev 69, 787–808 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-021-09986-3

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