Understanding how students perceive the role of ideas for their knowledge work in a knowledge-building environment

Huang-Yao Hong and Chieh-Hsin Chiu
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
This study explored how students viewed the role of ideas for knowledge work and how such view was related to their inquiry activities. Data mainly came from students’ online interaction logs, group discussion and inquiry, and a survey concerning the role of ideas for knowledge work. The findings suggest that knowledge building was conducive to developing among students a more informed view of ideas that sees ideas as improvable, real-world objects for collaborative and creative knowledge work, rather than merely as abstract thoughts for achieving an individual’s own knowledge acquisition. Moreover, it was found that how a group views the role of ideas was associated with how they improve the quality of the ideas during their group inquiry.

Introduction
As argued by Reigeluth (2013), the educational paradigm before the 21st century was based on an
industrial model in which standardisation and the mass production of manufacturing is highly valued.
Under this paradigm, educational practice tends to highlight  efficiency of individual knowledge
acquisition and accumulation by teaching learners the same content and skills that are predetermined by strict curriculum guidelines under a precise time frame (e.g., see Adams & Engelmann, 1996; Magliaro, Lockee, & Burton, 2005). Within such instructional practices, students are seldom given opportunities and autonomy to engage in self-directed inquiry that requires them to produce and continuously improve their ideas for knowledge work. However, given the rise of an information-driven and knowledge-based society (UNESCO, 2005), the industrial age–based educational paradigm is gradually giving way to a new economic model that favours customisation and a personalised information service  (Reigeluth, 2013). As such, conventional educational practice is also shifting to focus more on cultivating competent and creative citizens who are able to work creatively and collaboratively with ideas for solving urgent environmental and social issues in service of the public good (Florida, 2002). This is in sharp contrast to traditional teaching in which ideas are often viewed as irrelevant and disruptive thoughts that interfere with the pre-specified teaching plan and classroom routines. Students with innovative ideas in class are sometimes even treated as unruly and misbehaved learners. Unsolicited ideas are especially highly unwelcome as they forbid teachers from completing their deliberate instructional goal and their assigned responsibilities for covering more curriculum materials in less time  (Papert, 2000). Papert (2000) described such a situation that is commonly observed in most traditional learning environments as “idea aversion” (i.e., dislike of ideas). Inculcated with such a deep-rooted belief, it is unlikely for students to be given any chances of producing their own ideas and working innovatively with these ideas for collective knowledge advancement. It is also impossible for students to learn to appreciate the importance of ideas for creating new knowledge and solving real-world problems. The aim of this study was  to improve understanding of how to foster students’ capacity to work collaboratively and innovatively with ideas and to help them develop a more informed view of the role of ideas for their knowledge work. The two research questions concerned in this study are (1) whether engaging students in knowledge building would help them enhance their online performance by working more cohesively as groups while collaboratively achieving their groups’ knowledge work and (2) whether students who are more engaged in knowledge-building activities would also be more likely to develop a more informed view that sees ideas as essential objects for sustained knowledge work.

Literature review
Fostering a design-mode of view for sustained idea improvement. One way to help students develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of “ideas” as essential objects for knowledge creation may be to engage students in actual “knowledge-building” activities (Hargreaves, 1999; Hong & Sullivan, 2009; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006). Knowledge building is defined as a collaborative process focused on sustained production and improvement of ideas in a community (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). As an idea-centred pedagogical approach, knowledge building draws on Popper’s (1972, 1978) three-world epistemological position of constructivism. In addition to the physical/material world (world 1) and the psychological world existing in the human mind (world 2), Popper posited  a world  3 reality that is mainly constituted of ideas. These ideas are produced by knowledge workers (e.g., engineers, scientists, designers, and architects), and, once created, they are embodied within  a social life like tangible, real-world objects that can  be further tinkered and experimented with by other knowledge agents and become more powerful solutions to problems. Under a world 3 view, therefore, ideas should be treated as tentative knowledge claims and be continuously subjected to critical scrutiny (e.g., through examination, clarification, and falsification) for further development. Likewise, in order to develop a successful knowledge-building community, its members also need to perceive the role of ideas as world 3 improvable objects for collective knowledge advancement (Scardamalia, 2002), rather than merely treating them as world 2 psychological constructs for achieving personal knowledge gain. Unfortunately, as cogently argued by Bereiter (1994), conventional classroom teaching tends to focus on instilling in students’ minds a prescribed body of
knowledge from a world 2 perspective, while neglecting the importance of cultivating students’
competencies to work with ideas in world 3.
To address this concern, it is important to distinguish two different modes of knowledge work: belief
mode and design mode (Bereiter, 2002; Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). To elaborate, the belief mode
emphasises the ability to evaluate ideas and/or knowledge claims using well-established and accepted true beliefs. Students’ intellectual life and classroom work in schools is conventionally dominated by such a mode of thinking. When students’ minds are functioning in a belief mode, they are often guided to ponder questions such as: Is this idea true or reasonable? What are the assumptions on which this idea is based? In contrast, the design mode of thinking highlights the ability to go beyond the pursuit of truth by engaging in sustained idea generation and improvement for knowledge advancement. When students are committed to a design mode of knowledge work, they tend to ask questions such as: What is the value of this idea? What is it good for? What can it or can it not do? How can it be further improved? While both modes are needed for knowledge work, a main epistemological difference between the two modes of view is that the belief mode tends to highlight knowledge acquisition and accumulation by viewing ideas as knowledge claims to be verified; whereas the design mode intends to facilitate innovative knowledge work by viewing ideas as improvable objects for knowledge advances (Cross, 2007).
One important thing to note is that engaging in a design-mode of knowledge work is, in essence, a
metacognitive process, as one has to constantly reflect and plan ahead in order to continually advance
ideas. Particularly from the perspective of knowledge building as a social process, the kind of metacognitive behaviours  required for design-mode activities must be collectively (rather than
individually) attained. How a knowledge-building group sees the role of ideas and accordingly exercises its self-regulatory efforts can greatly influence the effectiveness of their knowledge advancement activities (Hong & Sullivan, 2009). Previous studies  have also shown  that productive collaborative knowledge work is greatly related to a group’s regulation activities (e.g., Dehler, Bodemer, Buder, & Hesse, 2011; Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002).

Fostering the process of idea improvement
Hong and Sullivan  (2009) proposed an idea-centred instructional framework to illustrate the
collaborative, emergent, and self-regulated process of sustained idea improvement in a typical
knowledge-building environment. This framework illustrates “idea generation”, “idea diversification”, and “idea elaboration” as three important activities for the process of effective idea improvement. First, in terms of idea generation, most research literature has considered it as an essential phase for productive knowledge or design work (e.g., Linsey et al., 2011), and an important line of empirical research has investigated effective instructional strategies or techniques to help idea generation (Faure, 2004; Miura & Hida, 2004; Mumford, 2001; Paulus & Yang, 2000; Rietzschel, Nijstad, & Stroebe, 2014). For example, Rietzschel et al.’s (2014) study found that when students were guided to work in a more narrowed (as contrasted with more broad) problem scope or when they were required to come up with ideas that were more original (as contrasted with more relevant), they were more likely to come up with innovative ideas. Hong, Chang, and Chai’s (2011) study found that it is more likely to foster idea generation when students are allowed to work on problems of their own interest and when the learning climate in an environment is perceived by learners as more open and creative. Second, from a socio-epistemological perspective (Fuller, 1988), idea diversification can be achieved by means of exchanging ideas or perspectives among members with distributed expertise. Previous research has suggested that idea exchange is critical to the process of knowledge advancement (Gong, Kim, Zhu, & Lee, 2013; Hong, Scardamalia, & Zhang, 2010; Perttula, Krause, & Sipilä, 2006). For example, Perttula et al.’s (2006) design experiment found that individuals who exchanged ideas were more likely to generate more ideas. Kohn, Paulus,  and Choi (2011) conducted two experiments to explore the knowledge sharing process during which ideas are exchanged and/or combined in students’ brainstorming activities. They found that group endeavour was more effective than individual effort in generating more novel and viable idea combinations.
Thirdly, from the perspective of evolutionary epistemology (Popper, 1978), ideas can be refined by
community members acting as knowledge workers reflecting collaboratively on the potentials and
limitations of the ideas at issue. Previous studies have investigated ways of collaboration to help further elaborate ideas (e.g., Chen, Chuy, Resendes, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 2011; Kipp, Bittner, Bretschneider, & Marco, 2014) and ways of idea elaboration that may enhance or hinder creative knowledge work (e.g., Kudrowitz & Wallace, 2013; Stark & Perfect, 2008; Verhaegen, Vandevenne, Peeters, & Duflou, 2013). For example, Kudrowitz and Wallace’s (2013) study found that the systematic use of a metric integrating three attributes (i.e., novelty, usefulness, and feasibility) as an elaboration means can be helpful in identifying more innovative ideas.
In a productive idea improvement process, once the initial ideas are generated, they need to be reified
(e.g., presented as a note or a message and contributed to an online database). Doing so helps transform these initial ideas from an individual’s mental constructs to become public property recorded permanently (e.g., in an online database). This is important as ideas conceived only in one’s mind (as world 2) cannot be treated as tangible objects for collective improvement. Further, the extent of idea diversification and exchange is a function of how ideas beget more ideas and interact with and relate to one another; and idea reflection or elaboration is a function of how collaborative knowledge workers try to increase the value of ideas and deepen their collective understanding of what the ideas can or cannot do to address the problem they are dealing with. In an optimal situation, idea improvement relies on an emerging process of idea generation, with idea diversification and idea elaboration serving as two essential social mechanisms closely intertwined to enable the transformation of initial  ideas into more innovative ones  (Chen, Scardamalia, Acosta, Resendes, & Kici, 2013).

Assessing ideas as outcomes of idea improvement
Along with an emerging knowledge-building process, ideas are expected to be transformed into tentative learning outcomes, including (1) initial ideas that are generated and contributed individually to a community’s database, (2) diversified ideas that are made possible through sharing/exchanging of or relating to the initial ideas, to (3) elaborated ideas that are further refined or modified continually by means of collaborative reflection among community members, and (4) more promising and valuable ideas that are made possible from opportunistically integrating diversified and elaborated ideas into more feasible solutions or coherent accounts for addressing a problem. When ideas as outcomes transformed from an emergent improvement process are to be treated as real-world material objects, it is likely for a knowledge-building group or class to form a complex collection of ideas (recorded in a database) that emulates a knowledge community or what Popper (1978) called world 3 reality

Results
Overall analysis of online performance
Pre-post comparisons were made between the early and later knowledge-building phases (using midterm as a separation point) for online activities (see Table 3). The rationale of using the two phases for analysis is because these two phases corresponded to the two main idea improvement activities, with the early knowledge-building  phase highlighting  more divergent idea-diversification activity and the later knowledge-building phase focusing on more convergent idea-elaboration activity. Overall, the frequency of all activities was quite consistent. There were no significant differences between the two phases in terms of all major online activities, except that there was a significant increase in the number of notes read in phase 2, which indicates increasing community awareness of group knowledge work (e.g., who was interacting or collaborating with whom in a group, and what ideas were being improved) towards the end of the course. Additionally, all the online measures were found significantly correlated with one another (all r’s > .43, p’s < .05, for all measures in phase 1; (all r’s > .31, p’s < .05, for all measures in phase 2; and all r’s > .60 p’s < .01, for all measures throughout the whole semester, e.g., see Table 4), which suggests that the more active the participants were in one type of online activity, the more likely they would be actively engaged in another type of activity.
As a main interest of this study is collaborative knowledge building, additional analysis of interaction
patterns was conducted using social network analysis. As shown in the bottom part of Table 3, overall, there was a descending trend in terms of network density from  early knowledge-building  to later knowledge-building  phase for both note-reading and note-linking activities.  Further, there was an ascending trend in terms of betweenness centrality from early to later phase (for note-reading only). To elaborate, relatively lower network density and higher betweenness centrality in the later phase implies that there were less whole community-based online activities and more focused small group-based activities. This  may be because that  the instructional design of this course encouraged students to progressively form groups and work within groups based on common interest in certain technology problems. Another explanation is that towards the end of the semester, within-group inquiry became more essential for completing each group’s final technological product. This is also confirmed by the fact that there were progressively more idea elaboration and intensive inquiry activities within groups (as shown by the higher-level scaffold use), rather than merely idea-sharing and shallow inquiry activities within the whole community and between groups (as shown by the lower-level scaffold use). It is evident that more frequent use of higher-level scaffolds was found in later knowledge-building phase. Collectively, all these quantitative online behavioural and interactive measures indicate that students were progressively more able to focus on their collaborative group work. As an example, Figure 2 (left side) also illustrates an instance of students’ online knowledge-building behaviours focusing on inquiring how to reduce the noise produced from typing the keyboard. To address this problem, for example, students discussed various ideas such as “using keyboard protection sheet to reduce noise,” “writing by using touchpad instead of typing,” “designing better keyboard by using new materials”. Figure 2 (right side) also shows the overall behavioural pattern of the frequent interactions among students focusing on note-built-on activities.

source : Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2016, 32(1). Ascilite