Enhancing Primary Students’ Online Talks and Epistemic Beliefs through a Knowledge Building Community Approach

Abstract

This paper aimed to investigate the effects of the knowledge building community (KBC) approach in enhancing primary students’ online talks and their epistemic beliefs within the subject domain of Social Studies. Participants were four classes of Grade 3 students (N = 157) from a neighborhood primary school in Singapore. Two classes (i.e., experimental group) were taught with the KBC approach, while the other two (i.e., comparison group) with regular (ICT-integrated) approach. By using a within-subject design and Chi-square analysis, the experimental group students’ online talks (e.g., questions and answers posted on a platform named Knowledge Forum) during the first three months and the last three months were compared. At the end of the intervention, both comparison and experimental groups responded to a five-point Likert scale on epistemic beliefs. Independent t-tests were conducted to examine the difference between the two groups in the three dimensions (i.e., source, certainty, and development) of epistemic beliefs. Results showed that the online talks of the experimental group shifted from disputational talks to cumulative talks, whereas no exploratory talks were observed. Compared to the comparison group, the experimental group generally demonstrated more sophisticated beliefs in the source and certainty of social studies knowledge. No significant differences were found in the development dimension. Findings and implications are also discussed.