Evaluation by Grade 5 and 6 Students of the Promisingness of Ideas in Knowledge-Building Discourse

Knowledge creation requires identifying and pursuing promising ideas—ideas that in their nascent form may not seem like much but that with development could grow into something big. The goal of our research is to develop a tool to explore the concept of promisingness and “big ideas,” especially elementary school students’ ability to make “promisingness judgments” regarding ideas in peer discourse. Toward this end we developed a “Big Ideas” tool to facilitate students’ selection of the ideas they thought were promising in their online discourse. A study conducted in two Grade 5/6 classes examined the nature of “big ideas” selected from the online discourse of younger Grade 4 students. A preliminary analysis indicated that students tended to identify as promising important facts and questions in the Grade 4 discourse. This study will inform future work in designing tools, language, and techniques to facilitate the concept of promisingness.