Fostering Emotional Well-being and Resilience through Knowledge Building

Abstract

Now more than ever, schools need to provide safe and supportive learning spaces that promote all students’ socio-emotional development and well-being. The current study investigates how Knowledge Forum can be used to extend classroom learning beyond school walls to enable asynchronous collaboration between two classrooms to foster digital citizenship and intercultural communication skills. Using sentiment analysis, we assessed students’ online discussions about family traditions during Christmas and their experiences during the Covid-19 quarantine in the spring. As expected, the Christmas discussion was generally more positive than the Covid-19 discussion, however, the Covid-19 discussion evolved from more negative to more positive. Additional analyses are underway to explore the extent to which magnitude of emotions travel within the community. Preliminary findings are interpreted within the context of designing socio-emotional learning assessments and computer-supported collaborative learning environments as schools move toward a hybrid model for the upcoming school year.