Promisingness Judgments as Facilitators of Knowledge Building in Elementary Science

Promisingness Judgments as Facilitators of Knowledge Building in Elementary Science Bodong Chen Doctor of Philosophy Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto 2014 Recognizing promising ideas is an important component of expertise and creativity (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Csikszentmihalyi, 2009; Gardner, 1994). The goal of this research is to explore students’ intuitive understanding of promisingness and to build and test pedagogical and technological supports to enhance promisingness judgments. Toward this end, a “Promising Ideas” tool was developed and continually revised following a design-based research approach involving three cycles of design experiments. The earliest pilot showed students at upper elementary grade levels tended to judge as promising “important facts” as opposed to “ideas with knowledge building potential” in their selections of promising ideas in peer-generated online discourse. A later exploratory study found meaningful socio-cognitive configurations conducive to effective promisingness judgments. With this understanding, in the second design cycle, pedagogical supports were designed around the Promising Ideas tool and subsequently tested in a grade 3 class where students selected promising ideas from their own written online discourse, knowing in advance that selections would influence the direction of their work. After making selections they discussed top highlights across all classmate selections and narrowed their choice to the most promising ideas to serve as the basis for their next knowledge building efforts. In this study, they completed two cycles of this selection process. Qualitative and quantitative results suggest that students as young as 8 years of age