英文摘要 |
Citizens in the age of information receive external authoritative resources, as well as engage in knowledge building. Academia traditionally favors the former. However, how do we foster an environment for knowledge building and idea improvement? This paper uses students from center for teacher education as subjects of study. The courses were designed based on the principle of constructive uses of authoritative sources, and used Knowledge Forum to help student learn collaboratively online during an 8-week period. Instead of using the conceptual inquiry thread as the unit of analysis, this study developed round of idea improvement to explore the responsive engagement of knowledge builders in each thread in order to reveal achievement or failure of deeper levels of knowledge advancement. Results indicate that students preferred to present their argument with authoritative resources at beginning of discussion, and then revised their ideas throughout the session, indicating that idea improvement is likely. However, from the results of the idea improvement inquiry, students are less favorable to the idea improvement activities. After investigation, throughout rounds of idea improvement, students did not feel that their ideas have been improved. This paper aims at revealing the difficulties in idea improvement in the realm of social sciences, and anticipates further discussion. |