ERIC Number: EJ1091319
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0024-9033
EISSN: N/A
Improving Students' Understanding and Explanation Skills through the Use of a Knowledge Building Forum
Hamel, Christine; Turcotte, Sandrine; Laferriere, Therese; Bisson, Nicolas
McGill Journal of Education, v50 n1 2015
Education research has shown the importance of helping students develop comprehension 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.
Descriptors: Educational Research, Interviews, Student Attitudes, Computer Mediated Communication, Scores, Elementary School Students, Cooperative Learning, Information Seeking, Teaching Methods, Written Language, Comparative Analysis, Computer Software, Gender Differences, Statistical Analysis, Teacher Attitudes, Foreign Countries, Questionnaires, Multivariate Analysis, Pretests Posttests
McGill Journal of Education. McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1Y2, Canada. Tel: 514-398-4246; Fax: 514-398-4529; Web site: http://mje.mcgill.ca
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Canada
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A