Advancing the Design of Knowledge-Building Software

Bodong Chen, Monica Resendes, Maria Chuy, Katerine Bielaczyc, Huang-Yao Hong, Marlene Scardamalia, Carl Bereiter

Multiple Perspectives, Multiple Literacies,

And Teamwork

Creating Connections and Public Knowledge

Advanced Knowledge Processes, Rise-Above and Improvable Ideas

Embedded and transformative

assessment

Graphical view

Multimedia note

Rise-above

Build-on

Scaffolds

Annotation

Keyword

Co-authorship

Analytic tools

Review Revision

Problem

Reference

Overview

• Tagging Key and Promising Ideas

• Scaffolds

• Visualization

• Concurrent, embedded, and transformative assessment

Tagging Key and Promising Ideas Promising Ideas tool

Keywords

To Tag Promising Ideas?

• Promisingness evaluation (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Bereiter, 2002)

• A need to identify promising ideas

A case study on Grade 3s’ discourse

• Design-based research (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992)

Promising Ideas tool

Identifying ideas:1. Click2. Choose a color3. Highlight an idea4. The idea gets highlighted and goes to the box

Promising Ideas toolPromising Ideas list:1. Promising ideas listed2. Choose a specific color list3. Number of hits4. Link backwards to notes

Pilot study 1: Grade 5/6 (Chen et al., 2011)

• 83 “promising ideas” from 207 notes

0.00%

10.00%

20.00%

30.00%

40.00%

50.00%

60.00%

70.00%

Theories Facts/Evidence Questions

Export ideas to a new view

Export selected ideas to a new

view

Pilot study 2: Grade 3

• Promisingness treatment module• “Progressive use”

– two iterations of “writing-tagging-exporting”• Preliminary results

– less facts/evidence– improved coverage of domain content

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

soilbithere soilcurr soilepa soilusda soilwiki

Cos

ine

sim

ilar

ity

mea

sure

s

Expert corpus

soil2011oldsoil2011new

Scaffolds

Improve scaffoldsScaffold Tracker

Scaffold Tracker 1. Frequency of scaffold use2. Embellishment icons3. Dynamic filter4. Live update

Future directions

• “Dynamic promotion” of scaffolds

• Epistemic agency?

Concurrent, Embedded, and Transformative Assessment

Content ClassificationSemantic AnalysisCognitive Diagnostic Assessment

Automated detection of “ways of contributing”?• Content classification

• TagHelper (Rosé et al, 2008)

Automated detection of misconceptions?

• Misconceptions in KF– Healthcare (Lax et al., 2010)

• Semantic Analysis– Focus on predicates (Slotta et al., 1995, 2006)

Source: http://www.knowledgeforum.com/Kforum/inAction.htm

Conclusion

• A single analysis or technique cannot do it

• Technology alone cannot do it

• Need for collaboration across teams

Bodong Chenbodong.chen@utoronto.ca