Exploring the development of college students' epistemic views during their knowledge building activities

Highlights

• Knowledge-building enables sustained idea improvement for knowledge advances.

• Knowledge-building helps students develop innovation-oriented epistemic views.

• Knowledge building is conducive to more effective group inquiry activities.

• Students' epistemic views are related to effective group inquiry activity.

Abstract

Exploring students' epistemic views is important as it should help to better understand how they acquire and work with knowledge. This case study investigated how college students' epistemic views relate to their collaborative inquiry activities in an online knowledge-building environment. Findings based on a mixed-method analysis on students' online discourse and open-ended survey questions suggested that students' knowledge-building activities were positively related to the development of their epistemic views. In particular, when students were able to engage in more productive and effective group inquiry activities, they were more likely to develop a more sophisticated epistemic view that was conducive to sustained idea improvement for advancing knowledge. The study has implications for understanding how students’ views on the nature of knowledge creation and the manner in which collaborative inquiry is conducted in an online environment affect each other.

Introduction

The need for novel ideas and new knowledge to solve emerging societal problems is ever-increasing (Csikszentmihalyi and Wolfe, 2014, Drucker, 2011). As ideas are essential for problem-solving and knowledge-creation and humans are by nature capable of generating ideas, it has become ever more important for education to consider how to nourish students' creative capacity to produce and work innovatively with ideas (Koh, Chai, Wong, & Hong, 2015). The challenge for knowledge creation, however, is how sustained effort for idea improvement can be maintained (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2003, Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006). Traditional education tends to highlight the importance of acquiring knowledge from authoritative sources (e.g., textbooks and instructors), but neglects the importance of guiding students towards generating and improving ideas for knowledge work (Chen, Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2015). Papert (2000) calls this phenomenon “idea aversion” (i.e., the dislike of ideas), and argues that most traditional learning environments are inclined to withhold approval from students who have their own ideas, while being in favour of direct instruction by teachers (cf. Kirschner et al., 2006, Sawyer, 2004, Sawyer, 2011). Students' self-initiated ideas are less valued and appreciated (than textbook knowledge) in most learning environments, and much less are students encouraged to devote themselves to improving their ideas to advance knowledge. To address this concern, the present study attempted to engage students in the sustained production and improvement of ideas in a knowledge-building environment. The main aim was to help students develop a more constructivist-oriented view that sees ideas as having an important role for solving real-world problems and at the same time creating new knowledge. In the following, we first discuss the essential role of ideas in knowledge creation from a theoretical perspective, based on Popper's (1978) three-world epistemology. Next, we describe knowledge-building pedagogy as a possible pedagogical approach for the transformation of students' epistemic view of ideas, so that they see ideas as fundamental epistemic objects for knowledge creation. Finally, we report our findings and discuss important implications for education and future research.