Developing Productive Discourse among Low Achievers in a Knowledge Building Environment

This study investigates how an understanding of and engagement with productive discourse can be developed among low-achieving students in a knowledge building (KB) environment supported by Knowledge Forum®(KF). Participants were two classes of 9th Grade students in a Hong Kong secondary school. The design involves students engaging in productive discourse, talking about what constitute good discussion, and explicit reflection on their discourse using KB principles. Quantitative analysis shows that students improved more on their understanding of discourse than comparison student and engaged in discourse that become more productive over time. Qualitative analyses reveal how the low-achieving students engage in the classroom meta-talk to deepen their understanding of progressive views of discourse and knowledge building. Introduction Developing students’ productive discourse has been the focus of recent research on learning, specifically in the learning sciences (Sawyer, 2014). Traditional teacher-student discourse, structured as initiate-response-feedback (IRF), has been the most frequent discourse pattern in the classroom (McNeili & Pimentel, 2010). However, under this rubric, students lack the opportunity to work collaboratively and to build-on each other’s ideas for sustained inquiry and knowledge building. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in dialogical teaching in classroom discourse and teacher mostly as facilitator in developing a rich dialogic discourse (Chen, Clarke & Resnick, 2014; Hennessy et al., 2016). As discourse is epistemic in nature and central to knowledge development, how educators can help students develop a productive discourse and how knowledge-building discourse in classroom is manifested needs to be examined. Knowledge building (KB) is an educational model and pedagogy that has been examined in various domains and across grade levels, but relatively little work has focused specifically on low achieving students. Discourse development is often thought to be particularly challenging for low achieving students, as they tend to be perceived as unable to engage in high-level inquiry and thinking (Zohar, Degani, & Vaaknin, 2001). If the facilitation of classroom discourse is important for students to develop a complex, epistemic understanding of their inquiry and discourse, then a focus on enabling low-achieving students to engage in KB is even more pressing. How low-achieving students experience and perform in KB work in both classroom and online settings are thus important to examine. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the role of design in enhancing students’ discourse understanding and to examine how productive discourse can be developed among low achievers. Theoretical perspective This study is based on the knowledge building (KB) educational model and pedagogy (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014). KB calls for the pursuit of idea improvement and collective responsibility. In the KB community, students engage in progressive discourse supported by Knowledge Forum® (KF), an online community platform. Students advance their community knowledge through sustained progressive inquiry using the embedded metacognitive scaffolds; (for instance, “I need to understand”). Ideas are regarded as a social product of the community (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014). However, students often engaged in disconnected and shortthreaded discourse instead of productive discourse in their online discussion (Zhang & Chen, 2013). Just as discourse is central to researchers’ and scientists’ advancement of knowledge, students need to engage in purposeful discussion and explanation-inquiry driven discourse (Kuhn et al, 2011; Sandoval & Reiser, 2004). An increasing number of studies have been conducted to investigate students’ discourse development and its role in learning, with many considering the role of discourse in students’ understanding of science and students are scaffold to talk like scientists in interpreting data and relate data to theoretical claims (Sandoval, 2003). From the perspective of KB, discourse is about progressive inquiry processes, understood to be a central epistemic practice in knowledge creation. As such, it is important for students not only to engage in discourse and inquiry, but also to understand why and how such discourse is important. KB proposed a set of 12 principles that are seen to be core to KB communities (Scardamalia, 2002), epistemic agency, collective responsibility, which together, provides epistemic criteria for students to better understand the development of ICLS 2018 Proceedings 879 © ISLS discourse. Engaging with discourse reflexively is seen to help students advance their epistemic understanding, to acknowledge that knowledge itself is evolving and extendable, and that it can be created collectively. While helping students to understand productive discourse for epistemic growth and metdiscourse engagement are important (Yang, Chan, van Aalst, & Tian, 2016), it should not be assumed that students will spontaneously develop productive discourse, even in inquiry-learning environments (van Aalst, 2009). In science education, explicit reflection on the epistemic criteria of scientific model can help students to engage in the scientific inquiry and understand the nature of science (Pluta, Chinn, & Duncan, 2011). This is similar to the KB principles, in that it is important to help students and particularly low-achieving students to explicitly reflect on their discourse, rather than merely engaging in collective inquiry. Students need to engage in meta-discourse to reflect on their online talk and to identify deeper questions for further inquiry (Zhang & Chen, 2013). Crucially, KB and other inquiry experiences are considered difficult for low-achieving students, who often have literacy problems and learning difficulties (Shen et al., 2007). They are perceived as being limited to low-level metacognitive strategies and unable to engage high-level strategies, making it difficult for them to plan, monitor, and reflect on their tasks and learning process and to highlight essential insights (Azevedo, Cromley, & Seibert, 2004; van Aalst, 2009). As such, it becomes particular important to help low-achieving students to develop productive discourse engagement using KB principles as epistemic criteria to monitor and evaluate their discussions. Earlier research provides some evidence of KB for low achievers (Yang et al., 2016), but the dynamics of classroom discourse and students’ conceptions of discourse have not been investigated. Overall, the goal of the present study was to design a KB environment that is focused on specifically on discourse development, reflection, and understanding for low-achieving students to help those students engage in productive discourse, and to examine the role of the KB environment on students’ epistemic understanding, KF discourse development, and classroom productive discourse. Specifically, three research questions were addressed: (1) What characterize students’ understanding of discourse, and how did they change after instruction? (2) What was the nature of KB discourse and to what extend did students engage in KF discourse? (3) How did students engage in the classroom discourse to reflect on their online talk?