Teo, Chew Lee

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.

This panel aims to facilitate an exchange between scholars specialized in various technology-enhanced socio-constructivist learning approaches with the common ground of placing Student-Generated Ideas (SGI) in the center of the learning trajectory. Despite varying theoretical underpinning and socio-cognitive mechanisms, these learning approaches similarly elicit ideas contributed by individual or groups of students in diverse forms and put them into the learners’ classroom or online community space to advance their learning. Examples of such approaches are not restricted to those which will be explicated by the panelists, namely, seamless learning, knowledge building, guided student questioning, student-generated questions, ubiquitous learning log, and productive failure-based flipped classrooms, but may also encompass problem-based learning, project- based learning, computational thinking, STEM, design thinking, makers, etc. The roles of technology in facilitating and enhancing such learning trajectories will be discussed.

This study explores knowledge building amongst low achievers using Knowledge Forum (KF), an electronic asynchronous discussion medium. A case study was conducted at a government-aided school in Singapore. It was expected that low achievers would be less capable of constructing knowledge independently. However, there was indication of a partial success in fostering a spirit of independent collaborative learning. This could challenge the practice of labelling students according to how well they performed in traditional paper-and-pencil tests. The aim of this case study is to explore the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in shifting the learningpattern of these lower achievers from the diferent ways the students experienced the process of collaborative knowledge construction using KE Through analysis of the postings and interviews of students, the shift of views about learning for this group of low achievers in the following major area was identified: perception of knowledge acquisition, process of knowledge construction and the patterns of communication and collaboration.

Singapore and Ontario, Canada, have been rated as among the top education systems in the world in terms of both student achievement and progressive management. This symposium brings together leaders and researchers working in these systems to discuss efforts to go beyond present achievements and to address new imperatives to educate for innovation. Both systems are experimenting with Knowledge Building as an approach to meet this need. How they propose to do this while also upholding other educational goals forms one facet of the symposium. The other facet concerns how this work fits into the larger picture of education for innovation as seen from the points of view of research in the learning sciences and OECD’s studies of innovation in education.

Grasping students' emotions, especially those relating to learning, in a collaborative setting is no easy feat for teachers. The quality of collaboration comprises both visible behavior and emotion and the less visible emotional traits relating to engagement and motivation. Teachers often rely on their experience and intuition when it comes to these invisible traits. In this study, we collected multimodal data from a collaborative knowledge building classroom to analyze when and how students' emotions transpire during the working and improvement of ideas. Data included textual data, self-reports from surveys, interviews, and physiological data from face-to-face and online knowledge building discourse of 17 students in a 2.5-hour Social Studies lesson. We found shifts in epistemic emotions during idea improvement activities, and the students explained these shifts in understanding the discussion and engaging in idea-centric processes. We discuss findings for ongoing work to develop multimodal analytics for knowledge building practice.

This study is situated in the field of knowledge building and teacher professional learning community (PLC). It describes a case study of eight elementary school teachers working on lesson design using knowledge building pedagogy to enhance student learning. The research question is: “How is knowledge building accomplished among teachers within a PLC?” The main method employed is the analysis of teacher’s discourse in the PLC. Results indicate that although not cognisant of it, these teachers functioned as a reciprocal layer of knowledge builders over their students’ work. Critically, teachers’ knowledge building was enabled by working with authentic classroom problems, embracing idea diversity and demonstrating epistemic agency in their knowledge advancement. Future work can focus on building teacher’s awareness of this layer of knowledge building and scripting creation of knowledge artefacts among teachers to mediate and record their collaborative inquiry.

To better prepare learners for the "knowledge society," educators in Singapore have embarked on a journey in experimenting with knowledge creation pedagogy in classrooms. The Knowledge Creation and Innovative Design Centre was set up to further coordinate this effort. In this article, the authors give an account of the historical development of effort in sustaining and scaling knowledge building pedagogy in the past decade, and present two recent research efforts of this Centre.