SimSnap: Supporting Knowledge Communities Across Individual, Small Group, and Whole Class Configurations (Poster 2)

• In Event: Theory-Driven Development of Classroom Orchestration Tools to Support Learning at Multiple Social Planes

Abstract

The theory of distributed cognition posits that knowledge is not held within the head of a single learner, rather, it is spread among the teacher, learners, and tools within the environment (Deitrick et.al, 2015). Within socially- and technologically-mediated spaces, individual students can "seed" ideas into the class' collective knowledge, which can support new small-group, or whole-class, knowledge construction (Palincsar & Herrenkhol, 2002). However, these distributed learning communities place a significant load on teachers to orchestrate the flow of activities and ideas. Despite the growth of tools to support students' whole-class knowledge building, few tools have been guided by learning theories that center the movement of knowledge and learning across multiple social planes (Authors, 2023; Authors, 2005). Influenced by knowledge community and inquiry learning approaches (Slotta et al., 2018), we designed a digital learning environment, SimSnap, that is theoretically grounded to support the orchestration of collective and successive knowledge building from individual, small-group, and whole-class activities within design-based science learning contexts.
SimSnap facilitates iterative cycles of idea generation and refinement at multiple levels using targeted configurations of three central elements: 1) a digital notebook, where students individually conduct research, examine data, and write notes; 2) the Idea Wall, a collaborative space where students can share and refine their ideas from the notebook or prior Idea Wall sessions with their group or whole class; and 3) interactive simulation experiments, to explore scientific phenomena. For example, while learning with SimSnap materials, the teacher may ask students to create a note in their personal space to answer a question (e.g., Why are plants important to our everyday lives?). This note can then be seamlessly dropped it into a small-group Idea Wall activity, where it can be edited and/or connected to the ideas of their group members. The group must decide which ideas to keep, reject, or combine, requiring them to actively discuss and debate ideas. Once the group agrees on their final set of ideas, the system can send these back to students to scaffold further individual work, or to the teacher to display for a whole-class discussion. The system creates spaces where, what was often ephemeral, knowledge is now captured, tracked, saved, and manipulated over time, making it possible for knowledge to be worked on by new configurations of students, or the whole class, to create new branches of knowledge through emergent, collaborative knowledge construction. Using the results from a thematic analysis of classroom video recordings, we will discuss how SimSnap: 1) supported students’ discourse and knowledge construction across individual, small-group, and whole-class social planes; and 2) supported the teacher in orchestrating class discussions at small-group and whole-class levels. As asserted by Rogoff (2008), we found that while appropriation of learning tools is an integral for learning, they take time to be fully integrated into the classroom culture and teacher's orchestration practices. Using a design-based research lens (Barab & Squire, 2002), we will also discuss how these findings impacted our continued design efforts, and current redesigns for a longer SimSnap implementation.

Authors

• Litong Zeng, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Shafagh Hadinezhad, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Dana Gnesdilow, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Xuesong Cang, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sadhana Puntambekar, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mike Tissenbaum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign