Category: Grade 1

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All grades Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4 Grade 5

Knowledge Building Analytics to Explore Crossing Disciplinary and Grade-Level Boundaries

Interdisciplinary studies foster integration of ideas across disciplines. Knowledge building pedagogy, with its 12 principles and associated technology, Knowledge Forum®, provides multifaceted support for linking ideas across disciplines and communities. This exploratory study aims to assess the extent to which elementary-school students within knowledge building communities work productively with ideas across content areas. Toward that end we examine “crisscrossing topics” — student use of concepts from multiple content areas — to explore the extent to which students think and theorize across disciplinary boundaries, use concepts found in curriculum guidelines at and beyond their grade level, and generate cross-topic notes that advance discourse. Results show that elementary school students engaged in knowledge building can extend knowledge boundaries and bring a considerable range of conceptual content to their work, resulting in productive discourse threads that contribute to community knowledge.

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All grades All subjects Grade 1 Science

Following Grade Ones Authentic Ideas: Knowledge Building on Water and Life on Earth

Starting the January, the Grade 1 class has been following students’ authentic questions and deepening their explanations of issues related to whether all water is connected, how life on earth came to be, and the water cycle. During Knowledge Building circles we took minutes to record students’ ideas for continual improvement and to help us reflect on the speaking turns of the students, how deep they went, and promising next steps that popped up from the students. The students took responsibility to introduce new ideas/questions to the community and contributed diverse and improved explanations of the ideas. They were able to connect knowledge learned from elsewhere such as the library, YouTube videos, and television shows, to their study. Idea improvement is salient in their discourse. The teacher listens to see if the students are still on task when many simultaneously being to talk to classmates sitting nearby during a discussion. The students are also asked to summarize their learning when there are visitors to the classroom.

Zoe Donoahue, Gaoxia Zhu

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All grades All subjects Grade 1

Emotion and Idea Improvement

Emotional and Cognitive Engagement in Knowledge Building: A Case Study of Grade 1

Zhu, G., Donoahue, Z., Fan, M., Zijlstra, B., & Scardamalia, M. (2019, April). Emotional and cognitive engagement in Knowledge Building circles: A case study of grade 1 students. Poster presented at the American Education Research Association (AERA). Toronto, Ontario.

Knowledge Building is a socio-constructivist approach that advocates students take collective responsibility for improving ideas. Teachers practicing Knowledge Building report it contributes to students’ emotional and cognitive engagement. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this claim. Using mixed research methods, we explored how a Grade 1 class emotionally and cognitively engaged in Knowledge Building, and what emotions and idea improvement moves characterize productive and struggling Knowledge Building moments. The results show evidence of the practice of Knowledge Building principles; most of the students engaged in Knowledge Building emotionally and cognitively; and multiple speaking turns, different emotions, and diverse idea improvement moves suggest progressive Knowledge Building discourse, and challenge is mainly related to technical issues.