Katherine Guangji Yuan

Investigating how students collaboratively advance online discussion has much value in understanding the mechanisms of novelty. Extending creative discourse by broadening adjacent novelty with new ideas is an essential benchmark to expand the community’s knowledge in a knowledge building community. This study aims to continue the investigation of the mechanisms and novelty momentums behind the discourse in students' knowledge building online discussion, with a new novelty framework to understand students' collaborative discussions. Results show a promising understanding of the discussion patterns from this new perspective.

The theory and practice of knowledge building is one of the most well-known and influential educational approaches seeking to foster a culture of creativity, collaboration, and innovation in classrooms. To date, knowledge building research has focused on the sociocognitive and technological dynamics required to sustain knowledge building but has not focused specifically on the unique infrastructures that enable them. To contribute new ideas that can advance our understanding of what and how infrastructures enable knowledge building, this workshop will explore and synthesize ongoing research that includes a variety of examples that deal with and conceptualize knowledge building infrastructures. The workshop is organized into four sections, with both pre- and post-activities, and have three types of participants: invited speakers; key contributors; and active participants. Ultimately, the goal is to find ways to widen participation in knowledge building endeavors within existing or new implementations across the world.

Despite the wide implementations and extensive research base that has developed on knowledge building communities, continued efforts are required to address the challenges of implementing innovations in diverse contexts as well as sustaining them over time. In this paper, we draw on the idea of infrastructuring as an emergent, multilevel approach that can shed new light on ways to do this. After defining the notion of infrastructuring and showing its unique potential to sustain knowledge building, we examine three cases of infrastructuring within the context of efforts to grow knowledge building innovations in existing educational ecologies. This paper offers some new insights into how infrastructuring can be conceptualized to expand and sustain knowledge building innovations.

Designing Informal Knowledge Building spaces requires intentional designs and effort. This paper presents a case study of designing a learning environment for cultivating collaborative knowledge creation with student agency for sustaining ideas. In the design-based studies, the datacomes from three consecutive iterations of the students’ Knowledge Building Design Studio (sKBDS), an out-of-school research program, as an immersive learning environment for knowledge building. With a sciencerelated theme, we gathered 86 elementary and secondary students (32, 32, and 22, respectively) and 1964 students’ online notes(642, 721, 601, respectively) in three iterations. The results demonstrate that students enjoyed the high-level agency in co-creating the inquiry structure, exploring diverse ideas, and deepening their understanding, and sustaining knowledge creation in sKBDS.

As a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students' epistemic agency: “reflective structuration” by which members of a classroom community coconstruct ever-evolving inquiry directions and group structures as their collective inquiry work proceeds. Using an interactional ethnography method, we examined how students (n = 22) in a Grade 5 classroom coconstructed shared inquiry directions and flexible group structures to guide their sustained inquiry about human body systems over 7 months supported by a collaborative online environment. Rich data were collected to trace the work of the eye inquiry group as a telling case. With their teacher's support, students took agentic moves to construct an evolving set of wondering areas as a way to frame what their whole class needed to investigate. Flexible groups, such as the eye inquiry group, emerged and evolved in the various areas, leading to progressively deepening inquiry and extensive idea exchanges among students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Learning Sciences investigate all aspects of learning, key to which is a consideration of all ecological factors and establishing the ecological validity of research in authentic settings. Educational Neuroscience has surfaced micro-level evidence to the various constructs explored in the Learning Sciences but with quite distinct methodologies and interpretations. The rapid development in both Learning Science and Neuroscience research presents new opportunities to amalgamate these two fields. This workshop invites researchers from both fields to discuss the potential and gaps in the integration of the research processes, the related theoretical and methodological perspectives of these two fields. We will discuss and demonstrate methods to measure cognitive, psychological, and neurological data in an authentic Knowledge Building classroom, mapping constructs and variables to integrate the intricate research processes across both fields.