Students' Intuitive Understanding of Promisingness and Promisingness Judgments to Facilitate Knowledge Advancement

The ability to identify promising ideas is an important but obscure and undeveloped aspect of knowledge building. The goal of this research was to examine the extent to which young students can make promisingness judgments and, as a result, engage in more effective knowledge building. Toward this end we embedded a design experiment in a Grade 3 classroom. In this experiment students were engaged in discussion and reflection of the concept of promisingness and used a Promising Ideas tool to identify promising ideas in their written online discourse. They used the tool for two refinements of idea selections to focus ongoing community dialogue. Results suggest that students as young as 8 years of age can make promisingness judgments that facilitate knowledge advancement in their work. These results inform future work in classroom interventions and tool development to promote promisingness judgments in collaborative knowledge building. Like scientists in research laboratories (Dunbar, 1995), students engaged in knowledge building participate in constructive and progressive knowledge-building discourse, in which they contribute to group dialogue in distinctive ways, including proposing theories, synthesizing ideas, and making analogies (Chuy, Zhang, Resendes, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 2011). A knowledge building principle that frames such discourse is “collective cognitive responsibility” (Scardamalia, 2002), according to which students share responsibility for advancing the knowledge of their community. To advance community knowledge, knowledge building calls for risk taking in pursing novel solutions to problems, with an ongoing commitment to continual idea improvement. Knowledge Forum (Scardamalia, 2004) is an online, community space specially designed to support Knowledge Building pedagogy. This pedagogy and technology has been adopted in international contexts and across the school curriculum (Scardamalia & Egnatoff, eds., 2010). The ability to identify promising ideas—ideas that with development might grow to something of consequence—is essential for creative work with ideas, but remains unexplored (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). According to Bereiter (2002), knowledge of promisingness is crucial in every kind of creative work at all levels, and accordingly should be recognized as an important component in the knowledge-building process. Knowledge of promisingness is acquired over time as people engage in creative practices, by taking risks and learning from the successes and failures that are integral to the creative process. This type of knowledge increases with creative expertise, helping people improve their ability to take successful risks. Thus, to prepare young generations to be future creative achievers in various fields, we should encourage them to make promisingness judgments during their knowledge building work. This study serves as a first step in a program of research that seeks to explore the extent to which young students can make promisingness judgments and how educators can support them. The study addresses two central research questions: Can young students assess promisingness, or the knowledge building potential of their own ideas? Do their selections of promising ideas, and further community discourse on these selections, facilitate knowledge advancement in the community? Promisingness and Knowledge Building Discourse Substantial work is normally needed to develop ideas to address knowledge creation goals. Single ideas seldom constitute problem solutions; neither do simple combinations of ideas. When the goal is knowledge creation, the problem space tends to be complex and the extent to which an idea will prove valuable cannot be known at the beginning. As Johnson (2010) points out, “an idea is not a single thing, but more like a swarm (p. 43);” to better grow, an idea should live in a “liquid network” where it can more easily connect with its “adjacent possible” (Kauffman, 2002, p.47). However, an abundance of possible connections to an idea does not guarantee the fulfillment of a knowledge creation goal. A significant challenge in all creative work, in both the fine and broad grain, is to identify promising directions and to avoid wasting time or becoming entrapped by unpromising ones (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). In the knowledge-creating context, promising ideas provide indication of future success or good results in a specific problem domain. Evaluation of risk and promisingness is a natural component of the knowledge creation process. For example, in his study of scientific reasoning in real-world laboratories, Dunbar (1995) found that scientists tend to categorize their projects into different levels of risk: a high risk project has a low probability of working out but may lead to breakthroughs, whereas a low risk project has a high probability of success but does not promise important discoveries. Assessments of promisingness help scientists determine how and when to invest their resources and time. Promisingness guides action of the moment as well as overall approach. To become a creative achiever in any field, one has to take risks at many levels and learn from the results (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). The current study focuses on knowledge-building discourse by young students, exploring the extent to which promisingness judgments might facilitate their knowledge advancement.