Abstracts
Abstract
Education research has shown the importance of helping students develop comprenehsion skills. Explanation-seeking rather than fact-seeking pedagogies have been shown to warrant deeper student understanding. This study investigates the use of Knowledge Forum (KF) in K-6 classrooms (n = 251) to develop students’ explanation skills. To this end, we conducted pre- and post- activity interviews with students who used KF to investigate various topics. Their online collaborative discourse was also analyzed. Our results show that: 1) students’ explanations improved significantly between pre- and post-activity interviews, 2) active KF users scored higher than less active users on the post-activity interviews, and 3) students who had the best written explanations on KF scored much higher on the post-activity interviews even when they had scored much lower than less active students in the pre-activity interviews.
Résumé
La recherche en éducation a montré l’importance d’aider les élèves à développer leur capacité de comprendre. Il a aussi été montré que les pédagogies axées sur l’explication plutôt que sur la mémorisation de faits entrainait chez les élèves une compréhension plus approfondie. Cette étude examine l’utilisation du Knowledge Forum (KF) dans des classes du primaire (n = 251) pour développer la capacité d’explication chez les élèves. À cette fin, nous avons conduit des entretiens avant et après des activités où les élèves avaient utilisé le KF pour investiguer certaines questions. Leur discours collaboratif en ligne a aussi été analysé. Nos résultats montrent que: 1) les explications des élèves se sont améliorées de manière significative entre les entretiens pré et post-activité, 2) les utilisateurs KF actifs ont obtenu des scores plus élevés que les utilisateurs moins actifs lors des entretiens post-activité, et 3) les élèves qui ont écrit les meilleures explications sur le KF ont obtenu des scores plus élevés lors des entretiens post-activité même quand ils avaient obtenu, lors des entretiens pré-activité, des scores beaucoup plus faibles que ceux des élèves les moins actifs.
Appendices
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