Cultivating Positive Knowers: A Practical Study Of The Transformation Of Negative Roles In Knowledge Construction Teaching

Students in the era of knowledge economy should play the role of active learners.However,in the class observation of vocational school,researchers have found that vocational school students generally present a negative role state,which is specifically manifested as shiftless people,passive participants and so on..This role status urgently needs to be changed.Knowledge Building is an innovative teaching theory in the field of international Learning Science,which holds that students should form Epistemic Agency and its core idea conforms to the development of the era.Therefore,under the guidance of the teaching theory of Knowledge Building,it is an important research topic to be discussed that how to intervene in the teaching of negative student roles in vocational schools and help them to form Epistemic Agency.This study relies on the Computer Application Foundation course of W vocational school in N city J province to carry out Knowledge Building teaching.Design-based Research method is used to construct teaching strategies aimed at transforming negative roles into positive roles through multiple rounds of teaching iteration design.The teaching process can be summarized as follows:(1)In the early stage of general Knowledge Building teaching,researchers observe and analyze the roles' behaviors of the whole class of students(50 students,male=20,female=30)to capture the negative roles of students(30 students are actually identified,male=14,female=16);(2)In the first round of teaching iteration,researchers design and implement targeted teaching strategies to solve the problems of insufficient learning initiative and relatively single learning methods displayed by negative roles in the early stage,including guiding students to conduct knowledge building discourse and helping students form a learning method system.(3)In the second round of teaching iteration,researchers improve the knowledge building discourse strategy and generate teaching strategies such as making artifacts,aiming at the problems of consciously applying learning method system and lack of active inquiry momentum exposed by negative roles in the previous stage.The data analysis of teaching intervention results is based on various behaviors of negative roles in the online platform of Knowledge Building-Shuke Forum,including three aspects: the amount of negative roles' behaviors,community interaction,and contribution content.The results of data analysis show that the number of behaviors and the frequency of community interaction of negative roles have improved significantly,while the level of contribution content has improved but the change is not obvious.These results show that:(1)After the teaching iteration,the negative role transforms to the direction of Epistemic Agency,which can be expressed as: from less involved actors to active actors,from community marginal people to central interactors,from basic level of cognitive agents to advanced cognitive agents;(2)Suggestions on teaching strategies to promote the above role transformation effect can be summarized as follows: the key is to help students establish learning methodology;leading students to carry out knowledge building discourse is a powerful means;guiding students to create artifacts is a breakthrough.