Collective Inquiry and Knowledge Building

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Back to Primers

Authors: Jim Slotta, Dan Suthers, Jeremy Roschelle
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Overview

Technology can enhance how students learn when they work with all the students in their classroom to investigate a topic. In commonplace use of web technology, teachers and students share information and may respond to requests for help. However, generic use of everyday social technologies rarely leads to deeper learning; more commonly, use of social technologies only makes familiar learning activities somewhat more convenient. In contrast, cyberlearning researchers have found that specific classroom practices and social technologies can be transformative. Instead of using technology to complete a classroom assignment (such as homework or a quiz), a classroom can use social technologies to undertake an open-ended investigation together, to improve each other’s ideas, and to emulate how scientists or scholars work together on an investigation.



ArgumentPeer helps students write and review arguments (from Ashley’s NSF-funded project)

Thus, in collective inquiry, students participate in a classroom community that builds knowledge and develops shared practices (Brown & Campione, 1996; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; Bielczyc & Collins, 2005). Advances in web technology (e.g., discussion forums, wikis, blogs, social networks) enable dynamic, socially-oriented designs where groups of students work together to improve their knowledge, and use the groups’ emerging knowledge to advance their investigations (Slotta & Najafi, 2012). When students feel that their work is contributing to the progress of a larger community, they can become more motivated and engaged in learning, and their progress can accelerate (Brown & Campione, 1996; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006).

In classroom activities for collective inquiry, students are given a high level of agency and responsibility for developing their own questions, exchanging and developing ideas with peers, and even assessing their progress. Teachers are members of this community, with a primary goal of enabling pathways for students to articulate and advance their ideas and to elaborate and critique ideas of their peers. Working as a knowledge community, students cooperatively and collaboratively develop a “knowledge base” of resources that are accessed, negotiated, revised and applied over several weeks or months.

In technology designs for collective inquiry, students generate digital notes, drawings, or other artifacts and share these within a technology environment. The technology environment provides structures for organizing and interconnecting students’ contributions in a format that supports the inquiry process (Stahl, 2000; Hoadley & Pea, 2002). In knowledge building, for example, a technology known as the Knowledge Forum supports students to add new ideas, revise materials, synthesize arguments or inform their designs (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Knowledge Forum allows tagging and linking of notes, as well as inclusion in higher-level concepts or groups — allowing students to “rise above” detailed notes to a more general theory or explanation, corresponding to an important step in developing a theory. However, Knowledge Forum does not provide tutorials or hints specific to a topic, as it aims to support a wide array of student-defined inquiry questions and methods.

Other approaches have included carefully designed sequences of collaborative, cooperative and collective inquiry activities. For example, in the Fostering Communities of Learners (FCL) project, Brown and Campione (1996) choreographed the distribution of expertise within a community, cycling students through specialist groups, with opportunities for “cross talk” along the way toward the completion of “consequential tasks” (Bielaczyc & Collins, 2005).

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