Scaffolding Metadiscourse in a Principle-based Knowledge Building Environment

Abstract

This study investigated how students’ metadiscourse can be scaffold and fostered in a computer-supported knowledge building environment emphasizing on principles rather than procedures, supported by Knowledge Forum® (KF), an online discussion platform. Participants were secondary school students studying in a visual arts subject in Hong Kong. In the preliminary stage, an exploratory study was conducted to explore whether students’ understanding of discourse was related to their collaborative inquiry engagement in KF. Current analysis of the exploratory study indicated that students who had a deeper understanding would take epistemic agency and collective responsibility in their online discussion than students who had a superficial understanding of discourse. Followed by the exploratory study, study 1 is conducting to design a metadiscourse-oriented knowledge building learning environment and pedagogy in scaffolding students’ metadiscourse through discourse understanding and reflection intervention. In the next step, study 2 will be conducted that aimed to address the problems identified in study 1 by implementing an adapted pedagogical design in which integrate with a time-line based collective mapping tool.