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Development of ideational writing through Knowledge Building: Theoretical and empirical bases.. NY: Psychology Press Development of Ideational Writing through Knowledge Building: Theore

Early draft of: Chuy, M., Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C (2011) Development of ideational writing through Knowledge Building: Theoretical and empirical bases In Elena Grigorenko, Elisa Mambrino, & David Preiss

(Eds.) Handbook of Writing: A Mosaic of New Perspectives (pp 175-190) NY: Psychology Press

Development of Ideational Writing through Knowledge Building: Theoretical and Empirical

Bases

Maria Chuy Marlene Scardamalia Carl Bereiter

Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) – University of Toronto

Development of Ideational Writing through Knowledge Building: Theoretical and Empirical

Bases

As noted by Rijlaarsdam and van den Bergh (2004), “The most frequent cliché about writing is that writing is a complex task” (p 3) — not easy to learn and not easy to understand through research into its processes and products According to U.S National Assessment of Educational Progress 2007, only 33 % of 8th grade students and only 24% of 12th grade students were evaluated as proficient writers (Schneider, 2008) The majority of the students did not exceed basic achievement-level and, thus demonstrated only partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and writing skills that are fundamental for proficient work

More and more jobs involve what Peter Drucker (1969) has termed “knowledge work.” Representing and communicating knowledge, although by no means limited to writing,

inevitably requires ability to use writing or an equivalent form of carefully crafted language Written communication through web-sites, blogs, e-mails, text-messages plays an increasing role

in people’s social and work lives Thus, literacy is no longer considered desirable, but vital for our society Within this perspective, the questions that remain central to writing research and instruction are: What are the attributes of writing expertise and under what conditions and

contexts can these attributes be acquired at school?

There is an obvious distinction between fiction, poetry, drama, and the like and the large and varied population of types of writing that include reports, editorials, instructions, factual expositions, and so on The first type can be characterized as “literary” writing The second type

is often, although inexactly referred to as “expository” writing The most profound difference between the two types is in terms of locus of value The value of literary writing lies in the quality of the writing itself and of the reader’s experience (Rosenblatt, 1978) Although a literary

work may have auxilliary value—such as teaching a moral lesson or illuminating a social issue—

this is secondary to the literary experience of the reader (cf Nell, 1988) The value of the second

kind of writing, however, lies in the ideas it communicates Accordingly, following Halliday’s identification of the relevant component of communications as “ideational” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), we may label the second type of writing “ideational.”

Complaints about the low level of writing ability, whether in students or in society at large, are almost exclusively focused on ideational writing They are complaints about the idea content and about how effectively it is communicated (In practice it is difficult to separate the two, and evaluation rubrics typically merge the two aspects.) The present chapter focuses

exclusively on ideational writing This is not to deny that the development of literary writing abilities is an interesting and fertile field of investigation (cf McKeough, Palmer, Jarvey & Bird, 2007) or that linguistic skills acquired through literary writing may transfer positively to

ideational writing (although evidence on this is slight)

This division of writing into two broad types goes against a trend that has been growing over recent decades—a trend toward increasingly fine differentiation of genres (cf Hyland, 2003 for a review of genre-based pedagogies) Writing standards and curriculum outlines today will often list a dozen or more genres, ranging from “letters to the editor” to haiku to “compare-and-contrast” essays, each of which is expected to receive specific attention in language arts

instruction On one hand, recognizing the varied functions that writing can perform is surely a good thing and it could well go even further On the other hand, excessive differentiation of genres has two drawbacks It tends to focus attention on structural characteristics, giving short shrift to purposes (What constitutes a successful, as distinct from merely well-crafted haiku or letter to the editor? Although comparing and contrasting can serve many purposes, what role

does “compare-and-contrast” as an essay genre play in the world outside the classroom?) More importantly, it tends to obscure the forest by planting so many trees Literary genres and

ideational genres may be mixed together indiscriminately or divided in an unhelpful way (The distinction between fiction and nonfiction, for instance, may be helpful in a library, but in writing development it obscures that fact that a dominant genre in children’s writing is nonfictional narrative—children writing about their own experiences.)

Most important, we believe, is loss of the distinction between literary and ideational writing This distinction is profound enough that it calls into question any educational approach that treats writing in these modes as simply a matter of different genres Literary writing is appropriately treated as a craft As with any other craft, the focus is on the concrete artifact and its effect Accordingly, there is much to be said for the various workshop approaches in which students help one another perfect their written products and the teacher provides guidance and instruction as needed In ideational writing, however, the proper focus is on the ideas If students are going to help one another, it should be help in perfecting their ideas Effective

communication of the ideas becomes a by-product of idea development The main body of this chapter is devoted to evidence that this can work

Writing Development: From Knowledge Telling to Knowledge Transformation

In 1984, Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Steinbach published a model of writing development,

explaining differences in mental processes between novice and expert writers In this model, two writing strategies represent two ends of the development continuum: Knowledge Telling—adopted by young novices—and Knowledge Transforming—adopted by mature writers

Knowledge telling consists in writing down ideas as they come to mind, under constraints of topic and genre Writing relies on discourse-production skills and the resulting text resembles an

oral production By contrast, the knowledge transforming strategy is much more complex and involves formulating and solving problems Ideas are not stated as they come to mind but are improved through the effort to reformulate and revise them as gaps, problems of understanding, and other challenges arise The transformational aspect of this strategy results from the

interaction between two problem spaces: content space, where the problems of knowledge are worked out, and rhetorical space, where problems of achieving goals of composition are dealt with The interaction between these two spaces is reflected in questions such as “Is my argument clear enough?” “How can I define the term I’m using” or “What is the information that can support my argument?” Such an interaction between content and rhetoric problem spaces leads

to transformation and development of already existed knowledge Thus, the ability to take over goal-setting, context-creating, analytical and inferential actions is a prerequisite of writing

transformation Knowledge telling could improve through increasing adherence to writing

conventions and increasing attention to genre constraints For instance, students may master genre formulas, such as the five-paragraph essay structure These formulas may improve writing performance by conventional standards while pushing knowledge transforming further into the background

Model B represented a more advanced version of Model A, with focus on activating relevant background knowledge in students prior to the writing activity For example, the teacher guides a discussion with students in regard to the topic of the essay, teaches them unfamiliar concepts, reads appropriate books and documents, helps them draw inferences, and generally works to ensure that students have relevant information to draw on while writing their

composition Teacher-mediated dialogue, such as Socratic questioning, is an important tool for achieving this goal Although the teaching model B represents major improvements as compared

to the model A, both models have the teacher as director of the process Instead of transferring higher-order skills to students, the teacher assumes cognitive responsibility for writing

improvement This encourages students to remain as passive actors rather than taking charge of high-level functions

Instead of developing goal-setting, analytical and strategic processes in students, the approaches mentioned above improve text quality through enhanced knowledge-telling—

thinking of more to say and writing more For instance, in model B, activating recall of

information facilitates long-term memory retrieval, allowing more text to be generated with minimal effort Indeed, there is now considerable evidence that structured and rich content knowledge enables long-term memory retrieval with information accessible in readily available structured chunks, lowering the processing cost and improving text quality (Caccamise, 1987; Benton, Corkill, Sharp, Downey & Khramtsova, 1995; de Groff, 1987; Kellogg, 1987;

McCutchen, 1986; Voss, Vesonder & Spilich, 1980) Teacher models A and B are accordingly mainly helpful for producing texts in which domain knowledge is to be presented “as it is” without major modifications (i.e., procedural texts, such as instructions or recipes) However, the limitations of these models are evident when it comes to the development of creative and mature writing

According to Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987b, 1989; see also Scardamalia, 2002), the model with potential for supporting high-order literate competencies in students is a model C that

“… can be best described as taking all the things that Teacher B does and trying to teach students

to do them for themselves” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987b, p 10) Thus, approach C aims to turn strategic decisions over to students, to as great an extent as they can handle, to allow the development of critical competencies for assuming agency in knowledge construction Thus rather than giving instructions and asking questions, the teacher models the process of writing, creates scaffolds to enable students to take over these processes, and encourages peer

collaboration in an effort to create a supportive community for sustained knowledge work Students’ own initiative in carrying out high-order cognitive processes is the main requirement

of the model C teacher In model C, relevant knowledge is not simply activated for each student,

to better support individual knowledge-telling, but the teacher models, and engages students in

making their ideas explicit and the objects of discussion and improvement to better support knowledge-transforming processes

Although teacher model A finds no explicit support in the literature, the ubiquity of workbooks, worksheets, and workbook-like computer software suggests that it continues to characterize much instruction, in writing as in other subjects However, the idea of improving writing competence by repetitious practice does receive some indirect support from what has come to be called “capacity theory” (Just & Carpenter, 1992) It has long been recognized that, because of the number of subtasks, constraints, and items of content and that must be held in mind, written composition imposes a significant burden on the limited information processing capacity of human beings, especially young ones (Beaugrande, 1981; Scardamalia, 1981) By continual practice of lower-level parts of the writing process (e.g., handwriting or keyboarding, spelling), learners may free up cognitive capacity for dealing with higher-level processes

(McCutchen, 1996) However, a complaint against the teacher A model of learning through exercise, during the decades when it was most prominent, was that it often involved very little actual writing (Graves, 1978), often limiting student response to single words, short phrases, or check marks

Other instructional approaches, which may be characterized as following the teacher B model, have taken a more systematic approach to developing automaticity of lower-level

processes and moving from there to higher-level ones Some of these approaches focus on

automation of handwriting and spelling in order to minimize their cognitive cost and free

resources for coordination of higher-order processes Graham et al (2008) suggest that

handwriting should be taught in elementary school several times a week or daily though

consistent instruction On the one hand, this would prevent schools from having children who

avoid writing because of the motor skills difficulties and, on the other hand, this would help to improve sentence construction skills and writing quality Overall, handwriting has been found to

be an important predictor of general writing achievement (Graham, 2006)

Of course, it is not expected that automation alone will cause high-order skills to appear Two writing instruction methods aimed at higher-level skills have won recognition in the past decade: the Self-Regulated Strategy Development Mode (SRSD) proposed by Harris and

Graham (1996), and the Social Cognitive Model of Sequential Acquisition (SCM) developed by Zimmerman (2000) Both models emphasize the importance of “self-regulated learning”, “self-control”, “self-instructions”, “self-monitoring” and “self-reinforcement” for effective writing development The SRSD and the SCM models have been tested and proved helpful with various writing skills (Garcia & Fidalgo, 2008; Graham & Harris, 2003; De La Paz & Graham, 2002)

While there are differences in these approaches, both models fall within the scope of the teacher B model They favor use of explicit instruction and well-defined steps, with the teacher guiding the discussion to help students acquire relevant background knowledge, providing

feedback, and instructing students in writing processes Independent use of the strategy by

students starts during the final steps of the lesson Thus, although the concept of self-regulation

is central and students are actively and constructively engaged, the main cognitive responsibility remains within the teacher This might explain why the SRSD and SCM models sometimes fail

to develop an adequate sense of self-efficacy (Sawyer, Graham & Harris, 1992; Garcia &

Fidalgo, 2008), that found to be highly related to strategic learning and motivation (Wang & Wu, 2008)

Two decades ago the teacher C model was an emerging model tested only within

experimental settings (e.g., Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Steinbach, 1984) Since then, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of developing students’ independence in carrying out higher-level parts of the composing process Englert, Mariage and Dunsmore (2006), presented three educational design principles developed within a socio-cultural theory of writing

instruction The first principle concerns the creation of socio-cognitive apprenticeship in the writing classroom, which involves interactive dialogues about written products and their contents (from teacher to student, and from student to student) The second principle requires the use of tools that would facilitate and support cognitive performance, by making outcomes of the

activity more visible and accessible Finally, the third principle refers to the establishment of communities of practice, with focus on knowledge construction and its dissemination (In the next section, we present an approach that respects these three principles and additionally aims to enculturate students into a knowledge-creating enterprise.)

Where does this leave the problem of adapting writing instruction to the cognitive

limitations of the learners? Beaugrande (1981) declared that the impression gained from vast empirical evidence was that “discourse production routinely operates near the threshold of

overloading” (p 2, emphasis in the original).

the instructional importance of writing process efficiency (see Nystrand, 2006, for a review) Capacity theory, developed by Just and Carpenter (1992) to explain the role of working memory

in comprehension, was extended by McCutchen (1996) to written composition Capacity theory emphasizes the role of working memory in the interaction between various writing processes Being overloaded by “basic” processes, young students would not be able to coordinate different knowledge, rhetorical and linguistic processes (McCutchen, 1996) A number of experimental

studies regarding the inter-individual and developmental differences in writing fit with this capacity explanation (Bourdin & Fayol, 2002; Chanquoy & Negro, 1996; McCutchen, Covill, Hoyne & Mildes, 1994; Olive, Favart, Beauvais & Beauvais, 2008; cf Fayol & Miret, 2005 for a review of studies consistent with capacity theory) However, a number of experimental studies suggested a more systemic view, in which cognitive capacity interacts with strategies to

determine effects on writing performance (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1984; Scardamalia, Bereiter,

& Goelman, 1982) In this context, the knowledge-telling strategy can be seen as an effective way of dealing with problems of cognitive load But this raises the question of whether

movement from knowledge-telling to the more cognitively demanding knowledge-transforming strategy is even possible through educational means or whether it must wait for the maturation of functional cognitive capacity (cf Case, 1985) Knowledge Building, an approach partly inspired

by the research on cognitive processes in writing, deals with the developmental problem by providing supports to ease the demands of higher-level processes and by shifting the focus away from writing itself to the development and communication of ideational content

Towards Knowledge Building

In traditional writing instruction and in the newer approaches discussed in the preceding section, there is the tacit assumption that the teaching of all kinds of writing will be carried out in

a course or instructional strand devoted to that purpose In the primary grades it typically shares curriculum space with reading instruction and in the higher grades it shares space with teaching

of literature, but in any case there is supposed to be a coherent approach to writing that is applied across genres The pedagogical approach we discuss in this section departs radically from this tradition The focus is on ideas, and there is no writing instruction, as such Students do a great deal of ideational writing, but it is not done as part of a writing strand but as part of collaborative

“Knowledge Building” in various subjects or problem domains (see Scardamalia & Bereiter,

2006, for an elaboration of the Knowledge Building approach) Literary writing within this context would be carried out within a literature studies framework

In terms of the distinction between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming

discussed earlier, it may be said that writing instruction generally attempts to foster development from the former to the latter by guiding students toward more sophisticated work within the rhetorical space—promoting composition planning, audience awareness, better use of syntactic and semantic resources, and so on The alternative approach to be described concentrates on work within the content space, specifically on idea development and improvement The

knowledge transforming model is based on an interaction between activity in the rhetorical space and activity in the content space This would suggest that teaching should aim at improving the quality of activity within both spaces and also increasing the interaction between the two This was the approach taken in research using “procedural facilitation” (e.g., Graham, MacArthur, & Schwartz, 1995; Graves, Montague, & Wong, 1990; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985) Procedural facilitation aims to provide students with aids that enable them to bootstrap more mature

composing processes Its underlying logic, however, is consistent with a traditional goal of

writing instruction: Improve the composition by improving its ideational content The

knowledge-building approach, by shifting the focus to the content space, reflects a different

logic: Improve the ideas by exploiting the dialogic potential of writing (cf Bereiter &

Scardamalia, 2005)

”Knowledge Building” has been defined as “the production and continual improvement

of ideas of value to a community” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003, p 1370) The students work collaboratively and creatively with ideas that really matter to them, advancing the frontiers of

knowledge in the classroom The goal of continual improvement serves as a structure for the activities carried out in the classroom This includes identification of the problems of

understanding, refinement of the sub-goals, collection of useful information through literature search and designed experiments, improvement of the theories by fitting them to newly

discovered facts, monitoring and evaluating the progress of the investigations, reporting the results, and so forth The knowledge-building approach can be used in all subjects and in all contexts where problems of understanding may arise

“Epistemic agency” is a Knowledge Building principle (Scardamalia, 2002), according to which students take on responsibility for the success of collaborative Knowledge Building and for tasks that are normally reserved for the teacher—such as goal-setting, global planning, and evaluation Of course, children are not expected to generate new knowledge compared to that produced by great scientists, but they are expected to come up with insights and theoretical formulations that make knowledge alive and meaningful for their community

Knowledge Building is supported by Knowledge Forum software

(www.knowledgeforum.com, see Scardamalia, 2004 for more detailed description), which

provides students with a multimedia space where they can write down their own ideas, comment

on others’ ideas, contribute new information discovered from research or derived from

authoritative sources, and raise questions that they find challenging These contributions are

written in the form of notes 1 that are organized in user-created graphical views Figure 1 provides

an example of the grade 5-6 student-constructed view, created in elementary science on the topic

of electricity In addition to textual information, both notes and views support graphics and video To organize ideas, the students can use the background view (For instance, in the figure 1,

1 The italicized words refer to basic features of Knowledge Forum.

you can see the headings, such as “How circuits work,” “Electromagnets,” and “Uses for

electricity”, which were placed on the background in order to organize the ideas by topics) The

participants can build on each other’s notes (build-on connections are represented by the arrows between the notes), write collaborative co-authored notes, or cite each other by inserting

reference links Knowledge Forum provides editable scaffold supports designed to provide

meta-cognitive support for knowledge advancement and “procedural facilitation” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1983) in terms of text structuring and meta-cognitive vocabulary

Insert Figure 1 about here

In knowledge-building classes, besides on-line communication, students participate in face-to-face Knowledge Building discourse, where they discuss what they found through self-generated experiments and what they still need to understand Ideas developed during

knowledge-building talk may subsequently be recorded as notes and further developed through

work in Knowledge Forum

Cognitive Processes in Knowledge Building that Relate to Writing

In the following paragraphs we discuss how cognitive processes implicated in written composition play out in the context of Knowledge Building

Goal Setting

According to Nelson and Hayes (1988), novice writers tend to use a “content-driven approach” to goal setting It consists of finding and assembling all the information that can be found on the topic By contrast, experts opt for an “issue-driven approach,” which determines the points of discussion and an angle according to which the question will be examined Thus, the experts dedicate more time than novices to goal refinement and definition of the criteria for information search

Setting and refining goals holds a prominent place within Knowledge Building The objectives are not predetermined by the teacher, but progressively emerge during the students’ investigations Most importantly, the goals are not static and do not remain the same throughout their work, as usually happens in traditional classrooms The students learn how to continuously refine their objectives depending on the progress they have made The goals take various forms, such as resolving a problem, answering a question, finding an explanation, and disseminating results of their investigation Once a solution is found, the students continue to evaluate it and analyze what new problems it raises Thus, the process of goal refinement never really stops

The goal setting is also sustained by scaffolds—cognitive supports available in the

Knowledge Forum software Scaffolds encourage learners to formulate and write down ideas in

relation to the statements, such as “I need to understand,” “My theory,” or “My experiment” This helps students explicate and refine goals without direct teacher instruction The scaffolds are customizable, so they can be easily modified depending on the type of discourse students are engaged in

Reading, Evaluating and Selecting

Considerable evidence in the literature indicates that good writers are good readers

(Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2000; Langer & Flihan, 2000; Pinto, 2004; Teale & Yokota, 2000) Indeed, exploring books, articles or encyclopedias to extract the information necessary for

written composition is a “natural” activity in most professional situations (Alamargot, Chanquoy

& Chuy, 2006) Reading and understanding authoritative sources helps with mastery of the subject, allowing formation of mental representations of the situation (cf Kintsch, 1998) To do

so, skilled readers interact actively with the sources by taking notes, commenting, highlighting relevant information and copying the citations during written composition (Kennedy, 1985) As

shown by Jacobs (2003), the ability to explore writing sources is closely related to the text

quality The errors committed during reading could lead to a wrong interpretation of the

referential documents and unconvincing arguments

Constructive use of authoritative sources is one of the main principles in building classroom (Scardamalia, 2002) All information is not directly provided by the teacher; rather, students are engaged in searching for reference material The students use keywords to create search parameters for pertinent articles, to evaluate the relevance of information, and to identify and possibly give new meaning or identifiers to complex concepts and explanations The

knowledge-use of authoritative sources is also supported by Knowledge Forum’s contribute-and-reference

supports, which allow students to insert citations in their notes and to place links to original sources The bibliography is then automatically compiled Thus, instead of copying material, students reference it, in the same way writing professionals do The inserted citations are then readily available and helpful for producing convincing arguments

Because students enter external source material into their working spaces, they are often dealing with difficult text, well beyond their grade level Because they are working with peers to build on these texts, reference them in different contexts, and so forth, the difficulty does not seem to discourage them Quite the opposite, they say that working with peers to interpret

difficult texts is helpful and seems to support them in authentic knowledge work As a result, students are exposed to advanced vocabulary and reading processes

Reviewing

Reviewing is as important as planning, since it supports improvement of already

produced text (Faigley & Witte, 1981; Hayes, Flower, Schriver, Statman, & Carey, 1987)

Improvements in text meaning are much more difficult to carry out than surface-text corrections,

especially for young students (Butterfield, Hacker, & Plumb, 1994; Chanquoy, 2001;

McCutchen, Francis, & Kerr, 1997) Graham, McArthur and Schwartz (1995) identified possible reasons One is related to a problem discussed earlier––difficulty in defining goals and

intentions In absence of well-defined goals, it difficult to recognize deficiencies in the produced text Another important reason is the writer’s inability to act as a reader—to evaluate his/her text from an objective perspective and identify possible obscurities causing misunderstandings

(Holliway & McCutchen, 2004)

There is need for writing environments to support the review process Knowledge Forum

fosters revision processes as students are continually engaged in reading each other’s notes,

asking for clarification of ideas and better definition of terms, and identifying linguistic errors that impede understanding With helpful review from peers, the writer can revise text to

accommodate reader needs As suggested by Rijlaarsdam et al (2008), input from members of a

“real” audience is possibly more effective than teacher feedback Construction of the reader’s perspective is facilitated by the fact that students engaged in work in Knowledge Forum come back to their notes weeks, and even months after they have been written This is because various searches and citations by others bring these notes back into focal attention, each time in a

different context This allows authors to “decenter” from texts and re-consider them in light of the new knowledge built more recently Indeed, as shown by Chanquoy (2001), revision

postponed for a period of time leads to more careful reading and corrections of the text

Transforming and Creating New Knowledge

One of the main distinguishing features of expert writers is that, unlike novices, experts come through their writing experience to new knowledge, or new understanding of the content they are writing about For them writing is no longer a simple expression of already acquired

information, but a tool through which the horizon of the writer’s understanding is extended The question that naturally arises is how new knowledge emerges during written composition? As discussed earlier in this chapter, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987a) theorize that knowledge transformation occurs through interaction between content and rhetorical problem spaces, with transfer of questions from one space to another There is, accordingly, continual enrichment of both content and rhetoric spaces, resulting in development of more sophisticated knowledge Indeed, as revealed in thinking-aloud protocols, the expert writer is engaged in continuous inner dialogue supported by high-order mental operations, supporting the emergence of complex conceptual structures

So, how can we teach this kind of inner dialogue? The most logical answer that goes along with Vygotsky’s theory of language (1987) would be “through external dialogue” A student-to-teacher dialogue may not be best for this role, since a teacher would tend to guide student’s thought and assume cognitive responsibility, as suggested in the forms of teaching interaction discussed above Student-to-student dialogue, in contrast, has many advantages While reading each other’s notes, student readers evaluate the ideas, raise questions relating to content and rhetorical aspects of the text and respond to peer questions, which are raised more frequently than is likely to be the case when the teacher is the sole reader of all student texts Further, Knowledge Forum provides cognitive tools to support knowledge-transforming dialogue

through its use of scaffolds to support high-level cognitive processes Scaffolds such as “I need

to understand,” “New information,” “My theory,” “This theory does not explain” help to drive the discussion and issues surrounding content and rhetorical problems forward See, for example, the thread of students’ notes from grade 5/6 (Figure 2: Student notes recorded in Knowledge

Forum), illustrating development of understanding of the concept “electricity,” collectively built through a dialogue between 3 students

Insert Figure 2 about here

Student EH – Note #1 entitled “What is Electricity”:

[I need to understand]2 what is electricity, where does it come from, and how is it made

Student CX – Build-on note #2 entitled “Definition”:

[New information] I got the meaning of electricity from the dictionary, the meaning is: a

form of light energy that can produce light, heat magnetism and chemical changes, and can be generated by friction, induction or chemical changes I think electricity is made by wind turbines, water wells and solar panels I would like to know what non-eco friendly sources can produce electricity

Student EH – Build-on note #3 entitled “What does this mean”:

[I need to understand] what is a heat magnetism and chemical change

Student CX – Build-on note #4 entitled “My theory”:

I don’t know what that is That is just the definition that I got from the dictionary [My theory]

I think it may be a way to generate electricity to use heat and magnetism

Student EH – Build-on note #5 entitled “I still don’t get it”:

But I still don’t get what magnetism is

Student BI – Build-on note #6 entitled “Electromagnetism”:

Magnetism is magnets Have you ever noticed the + and – ends on a battery? Those are the anode and cathode Electrons flowing in one direction is essentially what electricity is.3

As suggested in Figure 2, students ideas written in Knowledge Forum are presented as

notes rather than fully formed, well-structured texts This can facilitate knowledge-transforming and knowledge-building processes Generation of a series of ideas, presented in brief notes with

feedback as the work proceeds, would allow students to form a text representation as a dynamic and constantly changing form.Students are not trying with each note to present final product, but

2 The words in brackets refer to scaffold supports available in Knowledge Forum

3 Notes’ content is corrected for spelling, not grammar or punctuation