A Knowledge Community and Inquiry Approach to Promote Co-Regulation in Collaborative Inquiry and Knowledge Co-Construction

• In Event: 15.015 - The Knowledge Community and Inquiry Model: Synthesizing a Decade's Research for a Widening Audience

Abstract

Objective
We investigated how cognitive and regulative scaffolds integrated within a secondary school science unit facilitated distributed cognitive responsibility among groups of students and fostered students’ efforts to co-construct scientific and explanatory shared knowledge.

Theoretical Framework
Progressive collaboration leading to knowledge co-construction is the highlight of classroom-based knowledge communities. Knowledge community frameworks share four characteristics (Authors, 2010): Distributed cognitive responsibility; shared knowledge-base; scaffolds that facilitate members’ participation in knowledge co-construction; and collaborative activities that motivate students to advance the knowledge-base. We examined three dimensions of distributed cognitive responsibility (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; Zhang et al., 2009) as distributed participation in: planning, implementing, and monitoring collective inquiry; contributing high quality knowledge-objects to a shared knowledge-base; and, improving the knowledge-base.
Methods
In this design-based study (DBRC, 2003) a co-design team developed a garde-10 “Global Climate Change” unit. Five classes with 109 students participated in this research. Fourteen groups joined across five classes and each investigated the scientific, social, and environmental aspects of a climate change issue in a collaborative inquiry activity: “Issue Activity”. A customized Wiki was the main collaboration environment. We designed scaffolds to support distributed cognitive responsibility and high quality shared knowledge (Table 1) in the Issues Activity.

Data Sources
Data sources included wiki pages, reflections, planning pages, and page logs. We conducted concept-driven (Schreier, 2012) and temporal analysis to examine:
Distributed participation in knowledge co-construction
The quality of shared knowledge
Scientific soundness (Table 2)
Epistemic complexity and growth of ideas (Table 3)

Findings
Knowledge co-construction
Issues pages contained more knowledge-objects of partial and complex knowledge integration type (Figure 1). To examine group members’ participation in knowledge co-construction, we plotted coefficient of variation (CV) for the number of edits and the number of regulatory messages for each Issues group. Eleven groups had low to mid levels of dispersion in those measure (Figure 2), suggesting that group members participated in knowledge co-construction rather equitably. We selected two Issues pages for in-depth analysis:
Deforestation: Less equitable participation.
Ocean Warming: More equitable participation.
Regarding our emphasis on explanatory content, Figure 3 demonstrates higher percentage of co-written explanatory knowledge-objects in the Ocean Warming group, suggesting group members’ collective attention to the quality of their work.

Peer regulation
Requests for improving existing knowledge-objects remained rather implicit and in both Issues group students with higher quality contributions would sometimes leave messages asking for less active members to participate, but did not encourage peers who mostly contributed factual information to provide further elaboration. The Ocean Warming group used their inquiry planning page more effectively (Figure 4 and Figure 5). Except for one group member, all students in the Ocean Warming group accomplished their assigned tasks.

Significance
This study provided evidence that students can co-construct a scientific and explanatory knowledge-base. This work expanded the theoretical foundation of the KCI research studies (Peters, 2010) and added to the ongoing discussion of fostering meaningful knowledge con-construction and co-regulation and the analytical frameworks to examine how collaboration unfolds (De Wever et al., 2010; Rogat & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2011).

Author

• Hedieh Najafi, University of Toronto