The Effectiveness of Knowledge Building through Computer Supported Collaborative Learning among Elementary Students: A Case Study

This paper presents the third phase of a research project on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) involving students from 81 schools in Hong Kong and mainland China working on the topic of environmental protection. Instead of capturing an overall picture of all the participating schools, this phase of research focused on the effectiveness of knowledge building through CSCL by an in-depth investigation of the learning processes of students in two of the participating elementary schools. Scardamalia's principles of knowledge building were adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge building and 1,298 messages of online discussions posted by 153 students over six months were systematically classified, analyzed, synthesized and evaluated. Though some overseas research reported that even young children can meaningfully engage in knowledge building and benefit from the process through CSCL, this study found that the knowledge building was not as effective as expected, still students were found to have the potential of knowledge building in certain dimensions. This study recommends that teachers can provide better support for their students to facilitate them to turn their own ideas into researchable questions for investigation, improve ideas by criticizing the contributions of others, contribute to a wide variety of ideas and build up their own ideas by critically referring and comparing authoritative sources.