Knowledge Building - Principles of Knowledge Building

Principles of Knowledge Building

Scardamalia (2002) identifies twelve principles of Knowledge building as follows:

  1. Real ideas and authentic problems. In the classroom as a Knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding, based on their real problems in the real world.
  2. Improvable ideas. Students' ideas are regarded as improvable objects.
  3. Idea diversity. In the classroom, the diversity of ideas raised by students is necessary.
  4. Rise above. Through a sustained improvement of ideas and understanding, students create higher level concepts.
  5. Epistemic agency. Students themselves find their way in order to advance.
  6. Community knowledge, collective responsibility. Students' contribution to improving their collective knowledge in the classroom is the primary purpose of the Knowledge building classroom.
  7. Democratizing knowledge. All individuals are invited to contribute to the knowledge advancement in the classroom.
  8. Symmetric knowledge advancement. A goal for Knowledge building communities is to have individuals and organizations actively working to provide a reciprocal advance of their knowledge.
  9. Pervasive Knowledge building. Students contribute to collective Knowledge building.
  10. Constructive uses of authoritative sources. All members, including the teacher, sustain inquiry as a natural approach to support their understanding.
  11. Knowledge building discourse. Students are engaged in discourse to share with each other, and to improve the knowledge advancement in the classroom.
  12. Concurrent, embedded, and transformative assessment. Students take a global view of their understanding, then decide how to approach their assessments. They create and engage in assessments in a variety of ways.

Read more about this topic:  Knowledge Building

Famous quotes containing the words principles of, principles, knowledge and/or building:

    In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method does expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.
    Elaine Heffner (20th century)

    The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
    Primo Levi (1919–1987)

    The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think of a wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it.
    David Hume (1711–1776)