Knowledge Building - Overview

Overview

Scardamalia & Bereiter distinguish between Knowledge building and learning. They see learning as an internal, (almost) unobservable process that results in changes of beliefs, attitudes, or skills. By contrast, Knowledge building is seen as creating or modifying public knowledge. KB produces knowledge that lives ‘in the world’, and is available to be worked on and used by other people.

Knowledge building refers to the process of creating new cognitive artifacts as a result of common goals, group discussions, and synthesis of ideas. These pursuits should advance the current understanding of individuals within a group, at a level beyond their initial knowledge level, and should be directed towards advancing the understanding of what is known about that topic or idea. The theory "encompasses the foundational learning, subskills, and socio-cognitive dynamics pursued in other approaches, along with the additional benefit of movement along the trajectory to mature education".

Knowledge building can be considered as deep constructivism that involves making a collective inquiry into a specific topic, and coming to a deeper understanding through interactive questioning, dialogue, and continuing improvement of ideas. Ideas are thus the medium of operation in KB environments. The teacher becomes a guide, rather than a director, and allows students to take over a significant portion of the responsibility for their own learning, including planning, execution, and evaluation.

One of the hallmarks of Knowledge building is a sense of we superseding the sense of I, a feeling that the group is operating collectively, and not just as an assemblage of individuals. A wide variety of discussion software can enable such an environment, one being Knowledge Forum, which supports many of the prerequisite processes of Knowledge building. Bereiter and colleagues state that Knowledge building projects focus on understanding rather than on accomplishing tasks, and on collaboration rather than on controversy.

Knowledge building may be defined simply as "the creation, testing, and improvement of conceptual artifacts. It is not confined to education but applies to creative knowledge work of all kinds".

Setting children on a Knowledge building trajectory is a promising foundation for education in the knowledge age (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003).

In her 2002 article on Collective Cognitive Responsibility for the Advancement of Knowledge, Scardamalia proposes 12 principles of Knowledge building.MT