An Empirical Study On The Use Of Knowledge Construction Teaching To Promote The Learning Engagement Of Vocational School Students

Study engagement is one of the important indicators of learning process and academic achievement.Compared with ordinary middle school students of the same age,the problem of poor study engagement of vocational school students is relatively common.Knowledge Building theory pays attention to learners’ interests,and enables learners to be epistemic agency from beginning to end,and to shoulder their own cognitive responsibilities.Therefore,the application of Knowledge Building theory can solve the problem of poor study engagement of vocational school students to a large extent.This research redesigns the vocational lessons with Knowledge Building theory and tries to improve the students’ study engagement through the practical changes in teaching methods.This research focuses on three research questions.Q1: What are effects of Knowledge Building teaching intervention on the social engagement,academic engagement and intellectual engagement of vocational school students? Q2: What are the effective teaching strategies of Knowledge Building to improve the development of study engagement? Q3: How different are the development of the three dimensions of study engagement?This research adopts the method of design-based research,including the following processes: Firstly,based on literature review,a basic survey on the status quo of three dimensions of study engagement of students in four vocational schools was made.Then,in collaboration with a course teacher in a vocational school,we designed and carried out Knowledge Building teaching intervention together.The research object was a class of 15 year(44 in total,25 boys and 19 girls)of a secondary vocational school in Nanjing.Two iteration rounds(9 weeks,18 periods)were designed and carried out in response to the problems found in the previous survey.In the first round(1-4 weeks),with more initial focus on academic engagement and intellectual engagement,we mainly designed and used three strategies: "Creating situation that support ‘real ideas and authentic problems’ ","Creating a safe environment" and "Expressing personalized ideas diversely".It was found that the academic engagement was improved after application.But then new problems were found that there existed great differences in social engagement among students,and that the levels of social interaction and questions were shallow.Therefore,the second round(5-9 weeks)made some adjustments on existing strategies,and used three new strategies of "Knowledge Building Discourse","Forming community rules" and "Generating artifacts".After the second round of application,it was found that these two dimensions were also improved to some extent(responding to Q2).During two rounds,data sources included questionnaires,observations,interviews,audio and video records and students’ works,and statistical analysis was made with content analysis and so on.In response to Q1 and Q3,this research conducts detailed data analysis from two perspectives: Firstly,the internal effects of three dimensions and seven corresponding indicators is analyzed,and it is found that Knowledge Building teaching intervention has a good effect on promoting the three dimensions of study engagement.Secondly,an overall analysis of the process indicators of study engagement is made after the unified treatment,and it is found that the development trends of the three dimensions are different: the starting point of academic engagement is high,with stable development in narrow space;and the starting point of social engagement is low,and there were twists and turns in development,but the overall level of increase is also obvious;and intellectual engagement starts at the lowest,but with the best development speed and momentum.The results show that: 1.Knowledge Building teaching intervention can improve three dimensions of study engagement of students in the vocational school,among which with a significant effect on academic engagement and intellectual engagement.2.Teaching strategies to improve students’ study engagement in the vocational school includes: Firstly,personalized expression is the starting point,with diversification is the direction;Secondly,good community atmosphere is necessary to guarantee,including building a safe environment and forming community rules;Finally,Knowledge Building Discourse and knowledge visualization are powerful means.As Knowledge Building is still in the exploratory stage in the field of vocational education,and that the practice time was less than three months due to objective reasons,it may have a certain impact on the research.