Effect of Formative Feedback on Enhancing Ways of Contributing to a Explanation-Seeking Dialogue in Grade 2

This research explores the extent to which a new assessments can help students to enhance their ways of contributing to explanation-seeking discourse, and also investigates the extent to which expanding contribution repertoires helps students to advance community knowledge as a whole. To this end, this study tested both pedagogical and technological supports designed to raise the level of students’ dialogue. Repeated “meta-discourse sessions” were integrated in students Knowledge Building inquiry as a form of pedaogigical support, and students were also exposed to three forms of automated feedback that included Word Clouds, a “MetaDiscourse” bar graph, and Word Network visualizations that displayed important aspects of their discourse. Results indicate that the MetaDiscourse bar graph is particularly conducive to helping students expand their contribution repertories in targeted areas and that repeated metadiscourse sessions are valuable for aiding students in advancing group knowledge in general. Introduction The ability to produce new knowledge can be described as a capacity for “productive work that advances the frontiers of knowledge as these are perceived by [a] community” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). Increasingly, societal capacity for innovation and the creation of new knowledge is required to address the sorts of complex problems that characterize the 21st century, such as accelerating climate change, widespread financial downturns, and global political unrest (David & Foray, 2003; Homer-Dixon, 2000). The research reported in this study is concerned with increasing society’s capacity to create new knowledge by testing educational innovations aimed at enhancing students’ abilities to contribute to knowledge creation processes. Given that new knowledge is generated through the discourse that characterizes a particular knowledge community, this study focuses on testing pedagogical and technological supports that can help students expand the ways they contribute to collaborative explanation-seeking discourse. This research uses a Knowledge Building approach, which is a pedagogy that is uniquely suited to research for developing students’ capacity to work creatively with knowledge. Knowledge Building can be described as “the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community” (Scardamalia & Beretier, 2003, p. 1370). Knowledge Building pedagogy is dedicated to immersing students in a culture of knowledge creation that places the advancement of community knowledge as the explicit and shared goal (Scardamalia & Bereiter,