Effects Of Reflective Assessment In Developing Knowledge-Building Discourse Among Elementary School Students

Collaborative knowledge building is an important way to develop students’knowledge creation skills in an environment that usually consists of poorly structured learning tasks in which students need to make various choices and monitor,evaluate,and regulate individual and collective learning processes.The regulation of learning processes is an important condition for the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge building,but research has shown that cognitive activity among individuals and among members of collaborative groups is mostly implicit,and students are rarely aware of their cognitive goals,plans,knowledge,and strategies[1].Therefore,this study created a three-stage knowledge building instructional model that incorporates reflective assessment and integrates the metacognitive process of planning-monitoring-regulation into the collaborative knowledge building process,aiming to investigate the role of reflective assessment on the development of elementary students’ knowledge-building skills and the differences in cognitive networks of different knowledge-building ability groups,and to provide a reference for educators to analyze,evaluate,and intervene in students’knowledge building process.The study was conducted in an elementary school science course and completed over a 2-month period,with participants from two sixth grade classes(61 students in Class A and 57 students in Class B,for a total of 118 students)in an elementary school affiliated with a normal university in central China.The data sources were mainly discourse notes and pre-and post-tests contributed by the students during the collaborative knowledge building process.The research supported students’ reflective assessment of the knowledge building process with the help of student network diagrams and keyword network diagrams generated by the Knowledge Building Discourse Explorer Tool(KBDeX),the inquiry process model evaluation Scale and reflection form,and the summary reflection form that included question prompts.Methods such as inquiry thread analysis,content analysis,social network analysis,epistemic network analysis,and statistical analysis are used to uncover potential information about students’ knowledge-building discourse from participative,interactive,cognitive,and metacognitive perspectives.Analysis of student participation and interaction data indicated that the incorporation of reflective assessment resulted in more frequent participation and interaction behaviors and deeper interactions.The results of the analysis of student discourse content indicated that during the collaborative knowledge building process incorporating reflective evaluation,elementary school students,as members of the community,actively took responsibility for collective cognition,asked inquiry questions,shared ideas,and questioned or added to and improved existing ideas by responding to others’ questions or ideas;this process was accompanied by metacognitive activities,and students monitored,reflected on,and regulated the knowledge building process by analyzing,identifying,synthesizing,and enhancing the ideas or theories contributed by members of the inquiry process to advance the generation of community theory and the building of knowledge.In addition,students’ conceptual understanding was significantly improved,based on which a correlation between students’ higher-order discourse and conceptual understanding was found.Based on the results of content analysis,the epistemic network analysis method was used to visualize students’ cognitive networks.The high-level knowledge-building ability group had the strongest overall cognitive network connection strength,the most connections with strong co-occurrence relationships,and the inquiry process involved more cognitive skills at different levels;the medium-and low-level groups would show a lack of co-occurrence relationships in some cognitive dimensions,and in addition,the lowlevel group was immersed in asking questions and sharing ideas,and were less likely to drive the inquiry process consistently deeper through regulated learning.This research provides a reference for teachers to create a knowledge building teaching model that integrates reflective assessment;it adopts various research methods from multiple perspectives such as participative,interactive,cognitive,and metacognitive to provide ideas for analyzing,evaluating,and predicting students’ knowledge-building levels;and the findings serve as an inspiration for teachers to enhance students’ knowledge creating.