This study examines students learning from science text mediated by Knowledge Forum in a biology classroom in Hong Kong. Substantive research has been conducted focusing on individual and cooperative learning in text comprehension. This project extended the study of text comprehension to collaborative knowledge building investigating how students collaboratively advance their text processing strategies and domain understanding. The goals of the study were: (a) To design a knowledge-building environment that fosters students text processing and knowledge building; and (b) to examine conceptual growth and knowledge building in the community using knowledge-building principles.

Participants included thirteen Grade 12 students in a biology classroom. The problem addressed by the teacher was to help students learn from science textbooks that often consist of difficult ideas. The innovations and designs included (a) teacher modeling how he tackled science text, (b) designing scaffolds to help students process text deeply and collaboratively, and (c) rise-above summary notes documenting communal understanding. As a variation from posing questions, students started with identifying text passages consisting of ideas that were puzzling to them; scaffolds were designed to help students engage in collaborative problem solving; finally, they wrote summary notes identifying the best notes in the database. Analyses of student discourse suggest that student processed text information more deeply (from text to situation models); they made collective knowledge advances illustrated by different knowledge-building principles. Extending research on text processing, we have designed a knowledge-building environment that turn student thinking into conceptual artifacts and resources for fostering collaborative text understanding.