Rapid collaborative knowledge building: Lessons learned from two primary science classrooms

Cognizant that a critical 21^st century skill is the capacity to do rapid collaborative knowledge building (RCKB) in a dynamic setting, we are interested to introduce practices for RCKB into classrooms. Through RCKB, students also have opportunities to learn and articulate their understanding in a deeper way than traditional classroom lessons. We describe a research project in which together with teachers, we initiated lesson activities that enact RCKB for science lessons. Towards that goal, we envisaged 10 principles for RCKB in the design of lessons, and worked with teachers to co-design lesson plans and apply these principles. Reporting on our initial pilot study, we document some effects of our intervention package in terms of traditional and non-traditional assessments of learning gains. We started with 6 weeks of initiation activities (a.k.a. "Paper Scribbles" or PS sessions) in the classroom using sticky paper notes, which was followed by another 10 weeks of activities in a school computer laboratory with the use of the Group Scribbles (GS) software technology. We share our lessons learned in this study, discuss implications for socio-technical instructional design of successful rapid knowledge building activities in the classroom, and suggest avenues for improvement and further research. Copyright © 2008 International Society of the Learning Sciences.