Promoting copnceptual change in knowledge building discourse through advancing students' personal epistemology

Johnny Yuen, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This study explores relationship between conceptual change, students' personal epistemology and their participation and behavior in collaborative knowledge building activities. The thesis of this study is that to foster sustainable, self-initiated conceptual change among students in knowledge building discourses, four aspects from personal epistemology (PE) (Perry, 1970) and approach to knowledge (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1998) have to be addressed and advanced simultaneously.

From the literature, conceptual change is cognitive development process where initial knowledge structure go through changes. Vosniadou et al. (2008) claim that learners operate on theory-like knowledge base where conceptual change is re-organization of building blocks of a theory - be ontological shifts (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992) or creation of new ontological categories (Chi, 1992). Collaborative knowledge building (KB) (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993), on the other hand, is continuous collaborative intentional efforts in creation and refinement of knowledge exhibited by groups of people that potentially lead to advancement of ideas and production of new knowledge. Personal epistemology (Perry, 1970) is about personal views on diversity and uncertainty with respect to new ideas or knowledge from others.

Research on PE and approach to knowledge together detailed a more in depth and complementary insight to the importance of 4 aspects of a person’s beliefs in knowledge and ways of knowing for conceptual change in KB discourses: 1) level of objectification of knowledge (from personal inner representation to knowledge artifact), 2) structure of knowledge (from disconnected ideas to theory-like strucutres), 3) likelihood of modifying own understanding (from unlikely to open for continual improvement), and 4) structure of justifications (from personal beliefs to explanatory coherence of data from different perspectives).

Questionnaire on PE & justifications, and content analysis on knowledge contributed will be conducted to investigate conceptual change in knowledge building discourse, thus design research be conducted to test the thesis.