Knowledge Building

Facilitating Collaborative Knowledge Building

This article describes a detailed analysis of knowledge building in a problem-based learning group. Knowledge building involves increasing the collective knowledge of a group through social discourse. For knowledge building to occur in the classroom, the teacher needs to create opportunities for constructive discourse in order to support student learning and collective knowledge building. In problem-based learning, students learn through collaborative problem solving and reflecting on their experiences. The setting for this study is a group of senior three students working with an expert facilitator. The analysis was designed to understand how the facilitator provided opportunities for knowledge-building discourse and how the learners accomplished collective knowledge building. We examined episodes of knowledge-building discourse, the questions and statements that the students and facilitator generated throughout the tutorial, the change in their understanding of the problem that they were solving, and the collective knowledge that was constructed. The results indicate that the group worked to progressively improve their ideas through engaging in knowledge-building discourse. The facilitator helped support knowledge building through asking open-ended metacognitive questions and catalyzing group progress. Students took responsibility for advancing the group's understanding as they asked many high-level questions and built on each other’s thinking to construct collaborative explanations. The results of this study provide suggestions for orchestrating knowledge-building discourse.

Principles of Knowledge Building

A school culture that fosters KB supports research, innovation, and high expectations for student achievement and participation. The twelve KB principles are continuously emphasized for and by teachers, students, and the school environment as a whole.

• Real Ideas and Authentic Problems – students identify real problems to study
• Improvable Ideas – ideas are improvable rather than accepted or rejected
• Epistemic Agency – students plan and engage in the process
• Collective Responsibility for Community Knowledge – all participants contribute to community goals
• Democratizing Knowledge – all participants are empowered; no knowledge have/have-not lines
• Idea Diversity – knowledge advancement depends on diversity of ideas, just as an ecosystem depends on biodiversity
• KB Discourse – problems progressively identified and addressed and new conceptualizations built
• Rise Above – by transcending trivialities and oversimplifications, students work towards more inclusive principles and higher level formulations of problems
• Constructive Use of Authoritative Sources – critically evaluate authoritative sources, don't just find “the answer”
• Pervasive KB – KB is a continuous process and can happen anywhere; it is not unique to the classroom
• Symmetric Knowledge Advance – “to give knowledge is to get knowledge”; there is no one expert
• Embedded and Transformative Assessment – integral to KB and helps to advance knowledge through identifying advances, problems, and gaps as work proceeds