=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2128/designsci4
|storemode=property
|title=A Practitioner's Insight on Grade 5 Pupils Developing and Improving Theory in the Topic of Cells
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2128/designsci4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2128
|authors=Chew Lee,Ushanthini Arumugam,Jamay Loh,Andy Ng Ding Xuan
}}
==A Practitioner's Insight on Grade 5 Pupils Developing and Improving Theory in the Topic of Cells==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2128/designsci4.pdf</pdf>
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    A Practitioner’s Insight on Grade 5 Pupils developing and improving
                          theory in the topic of cells.
                   Teo Chew Lee, National Institute of Education, chewlee.teo@nie.edu.sg;
       Ushanthini Arumugam, Jamay Loh Shwu Hwa, Andy Ng Ding Xuan, St. Hilda’s Primary School,
       ushanthini_arumugam@moe.edu.sg, lin-loh_shwu_hwa@moe.edu.sg, ng_ding_xuan@moe.edu.sg

         Abstract: Knowledge Building has been defined as "the production and continual improvement
         of ideas of value to a community, through means that enable the community to accomplish more
         than the sum of individual’s contribution" (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014). The theoretical
         concept and research findings have been extremely forthcoming. The question remained that of
         “What do these abstract definitions of knowledge creation trajectories look like in a classroom?”.
         It has been talked about in educational research in the past decades, but the concept of the idea-
         centric classroom has remained elusive to many teachers. In this study, we describe an effort to
         clarify this 'elusive' practice by developing practice-based knowledge about the trajectories of
         knowledge-building activities and outcomes through a practitioner’s reflection and recount. The
         process of idea generation; theory improvement through pupils' scientific reasoning is described
         through the reflection of the practitioner. This practitioner has two years of KB experience
         embedded within six years of teaching experience. The discussion of this narration aims to
         provide insights into (i) teacher's curriculum knowledge to support the knowledge building
         practice; (ii) teacher's interpretation of the cognitive and social practices needed for pupils to
         improve theories. The paper also highlights the seized and missed opportunities of a principle-
         based approach to lesson design.
Introduction
Knowledge building pedagogy is a principle-based approach to learning that has a goal of co-creating “new”
perspectives or understanding advanced knowledge beyond just the limit of an individual, it is a collective effort
to explore and learn more about the topic. This case study describes a practitioner’s (second year of knowledge
building work but with six years of teaching experience) recount and reflection of a series of 4 one-hour lessons
Knowledge Building (KB) lesson she designed and enacted. These lessons spanned over three weeks. The teacher
worked with 26 high-progress pupils in this particular class. She was keen to explore the possibilities of using
Knowledge Forum (KF) to start a new topic on Cells with all the current constraints of time, curriculum and
assessment demand. She started with a problem of understanding for her practice “I would like to find out how
the KB approach in the classroom really impact pupils’ learning in Science?” Her focus was on getting pupils to
improve their theories on “cells” to bring about deeper learning. A set of curriculum mapping (connections across
facts, concepts, and theories in the topic of cells) was put together at the teachers’ weekly meeting to understand
the teacher’s perspectives and her take on the content required in the curriculum document.
          The teacher’s reflection, lesson design and enactment were recorded. In this paper, we will discuss the
areas of (i) content to be covered; (ii) activities designed; (iii) thinking scaffold adopted; (iv) point of interest or
worthy ideas picked up by teachers, strategies to recognise patterns in pupils discussions to highlight
misconceptions; (v) pupils’ outcomes; in each phase of her lessons (see Appendix A). All pupils’ discourses are
recorded on Knowledge Forum. In this reflection, the teacher also systematically analysed the notes from her
lesson to identify key points of interest to be addressed in her next lesson. We also coded 226 of her pupils’ notes
in two KF views for (i) quality of questions and (ii) quality of explanation after each iteration to inform her of her
pupils’ knowledge building trajectory and learning.
Teachers’ understanding of content and curriculum as captured by a
collaborative curriculum map




         Figure 1. Unpacking the facts, concepts and theories in curriculum on the topic of ‘cells’.
          Using the knowledge structure of facts, concepts, theories (Erickson, 2006), the teacher with her KB
teammates mapped out the curriculum demand of cells (see Figure 1). The concepts identified by the teachers
were ‘adaptation, specialisation and functions of cells, ‘interactions of cell parts”. The teachers found it difficult
to decide if functions of cells should be a fact to be learned or a concept to be understood. They, nevertheless,
decided to place it under concepts, rationalising the fact the pupils need to know the individual functions of the
cell parts, then compare and contrast them to derive a common understanding of the overall functions.


Lesson 1: Figuring out pupils’ problem of understanding: Idea generation
using KF scaffold
The teacher started the series of lesson with a KWL activity (what I know/what I want to know/ what I learned)
with a rationale of wanting to use what her pupils “do not know” to guide her lesson (see Figure 2). This lesson
on “What is a cell?” was conducted over 2 periods (1 hour) in a single seating during curriculum time. The pupils
had their one-to-one computing device to facilitate the use of KB during the lesson.
         “My approach was to simply ask a question “What is a cell?” without giving any clue such that
         it would tease out pupils’ initial conception and ideas of what a cell was. I did not dictate what
         the pupils should know. Instead, I wish to know what the pupils do not know as that would
         better guide me to craft my KB lesson design.”




 Figure 2. First Knowledge Forum view where pupils posted questions and ideas about cells in a KWL activity.

          The teacher studied the notes carefully and concluded that the pupils could state that there were different
cell types such as egg cell, bacteria cell, plant cell but she identified the following gap.


         “However, they were not sure which cell had a nucleus. Using their discussions and questions,
         I thought it was timely to post differences between plant vs animal cells to narrow down to these
         two cells that they were bouncing ideas about and seemingly asking…”

         She then picked out the following post, “Is this cell a plant or animal cell?” that inspired her for her
second lesson on differences between plant and animal cells. She also identified the following notes that defined
pupils’ misconceptions that needed to be addressed quickly.

           “…pupils mentioned that only animal cells had a nucleus which is a misconception and it was
         important for me to ensure that this was clarified by the next lesson.”
         She reflected that the lesson gave her insights to the many variations of ideas pupils had about cells and
framed a key context for her next lesson. She was also intrigued by a question from a pupil (see Figure 3) who
was able to question beyond the structure and appearance of a cell “What is really a cell? You have shown the
structure, not what a cell itself is”. With this understanding of her pupils’ ideas, she was convinced that she should
consider alternative cascading “chains” (leading ideas) that could serve as potential pointers for discussion in the
next lesson.
   Figure 3. Pupil’s responding to the question of “What is a cell?” by going beyond the structure of the cell.


Lesson 2: Uniqueness of cell (Customized cell scaffold)
This second lesson was focused on pupils differentiating plant and animal cells as that addressed pupils’ vague
understanding about cells and the cell parts in the first lesson.


         “I had pupils to use the customised scaffolds to build ideas that were more interconnected with
         one another and to particularly focus their attention to using key concept related words.”


Two pedagogical moves by teacher to allow more independent inquiry from pupils
Customised scaffolds (e.g. the cell is different from the other cell because…; this part is important because…)
were designed and adopted for pupils to initiate and lead discussions spontaneously. The teacher felt that her
original generic scaffolds in KF were rather abstract for her pupils and she wanted to contextualise the scaffolds
to a more familiar context for her pupils, i.e. the context of cells.
         The teacher decided to provide two images to pupils. Instead of directly telling pupils to list out
differences between plant and animal cells, the term ‘unique’ was used and unpacked using the scaffolds which
were customised for them to ideate anything they knew about the cell parts.


        “In lesson 2, these pictures specific type of cell, e.g. (see Figure. 4) were posted intentionally but
        pupils were not informed that they were the human cheek cell and hydrilla leaf cell. However, they
        were told that the cell on the left was an animal cell and the right was a plant cell. Using this, they
        had to come up with evidences to support their reasoning. The visual stimulus should help them
        differentiate that the green cells on the right were plant cells as they had chlorophyll in them and
        were greener than the cell on the left.”




          Figure 4. Visualisation to get pupils to think deeper into the differences of plant and animal cells.


          She observed that the pupils were building on ideas and were making connections from ideas and that
was the initial start for scientific concept building. This is also triangulated with the analysis discussed in result
section in this paper. As can be seen in result section, pupils’ reasoning of ideas has improved from Lesson 1 to
Lesson 2.
          It was also in this second lesson that the teacher recognised a pattern in pupils’ post on KB that led her
to identify some ‘islands of discussions’ (see Figure 5) that highlighted interesting ideas as well as misconceptions
on the topic. This was a new strategy discovered to help her to focus and navigate through the multitude of posts
made on KB which could be overwhelming.
                                   Figure 5. Discussion thread identified by teachers.

Discussion thread 1: Interesting ideas identified:
       Note 1: “the plant cells are greener so I assumed that the plant cells have chlorophyll in them.”
       Note 2: “<The cell is different from the other cell because> the plant cells are arranged in a
       structure but the animal cells have no structure. Maybe since the animal cells are irregular, they
       cannot fit together to make a structure.”
       Note 3: “…there are only plant cells and animal cells”
       Note 3: “<The part is important because” are you sure that there are only 2 types of cells?
       Perhaps there are more types of cells, like bacteria and fungi cells? Perhaps there are more,
       Right?”

Discussion thread 2: Teacher identified misconceptions:
       “One pupil had mentioned that an animal cell had a cell wall but a plant cell did not have a cell
       wall. This post attracted such attention that many pupils started raising flags and cited evidences
       to prove with explanations that it was indeed the converse. There were many arrows pointing to
       this post and that triggered me to take a look at their point of discussion. What amazed me was
       that pupils whom were quietest started correcting their peers online. It was instant success, as
       immediate peer-review and engaged learning was taking place spontaneously.”

In addition to the concepts and content, the teacher started to notice a shift in pupils’ learning patterns, e.g. weaker
pupils speaking:
          “I was attracted to this pool of discussion as I also noted one of my weaker learners contributing
          and making his stand...The discussion was getting richer and I noted that pupils were unlearning
          their misconceptions , relearning and re-teaching one another. “Pupils also clarified about the
          presence of nucleus in both animal and plant cells which they were unclear in lesson 1. Pupil
          L’s comments captured were able to also add on the differences of both cells. Hence, at this
          point I had to intervene and use this lesson as a dipstick to address and clarify misconceptions.
          Before lesson ended, a consolidation was done on the functions of cell parts as they started
          mentioning about vacuole, cell wall, cytoplasm and the characteristics of plant cell and animal
          cell.”

Lesson 3: Developing Promising Ideas through Constructing Analogy
         “This was the post from pupil R which guided me in my lesson design for Lesson 3. This post
         also further inspired me to think of pupils existing conception.” “They only thought 2 types of
         cells existed. Hence, it was important for me to also address other types of plant cells which
         were irregularly shaped and address another misconception that highlighted that all plant cells
         had chloroplasts.” (Pupil’s note on KF)

          Teacher also noticed that pupils were starting to work with and improve each other’s ideas. E.g. Teacher
highlighted a series of pupil questions based on another pupils’ idea, “All plants have chloroplast within their
cells”, and she went on further to support her ‘better theory’ with reasoning.
         Now that she was confident of the pupils learning different parts of the cell, she tasked them to do an
analogy of a cell in a real world context. E.g. A cell is like a castle. This analogy task was a fun and engaging
assessment of learning aimed at allowing pupils to demonstrate their learning from the knowledge building
process.
         Pupils posted their analogies on KF and they had to choose and justify who had the most promising idea.
The criteria for “promising” was that the idea had the potential to lead the community to a better understanding
of the nature of cells .




                         Figure 6. Pupil selects a promising idea and justify their selection

Lesson 4: Building on pupil’s ideas to conclude “perhaps there are more than
2 types of cells”
This fourth lesson focused on getting pupils to apply the fundamental concepts to new contexts through exploring
an unfamiliar context, the Euglena1. Teacher reflected,
         “The inspiration for the Euglena question came about when I noted pupils listing a cell that
         featured both characteristics of a plant and animal cell. As a pupil mentioned, ‘What if there
         were cells that had both characteristics?”. Also using pupils’ misconceptions raised in Lesson
         2, that there were only 2 types of cells, I was determined to show them that there were more
         than these 2 types of cells in the real-world context. Hence, this could be an avenue to create an
         awareness amongst pupils about cells that were not made up of just 2 cell types.
Findings: Impact on pupils’ knowledge building activities
106 notes from the earlier KF view on “uniqueness of cell” and 110 notes from the latter view on “Euglena” were
analysed for the quality of questions and explanation. The following graph shows difference in the number of
notes from the two views (see Figure 7). The pupils are clearly thinking in a more complex way as the lessons
progressed as they were found to be writing notes that indicate a certain level of analysis (ideas include synthesis
and analysis of facts) and synthesis (connecting ideas) in the notes on the latter view.

                     Quality of Questions and Explanations posted by pupils in two KF views
 35
 30
 25
 20
 15
 10
  5
  0
      fact-seeking explanation KB question guess/raw idea include idea include     new    connecting connecting     new
        question     seeking    (not from    ideas     relevant anlalysis & knowledge/ two points two points; knowledge
                    questions text-book)               evidence synthesis of      ideas               suggesting    from
                                  usually              and facts     facts     created to            connections connections
                                related to                                       explain
                                real world
                                   issue

                                Earlier view (uniqueness of cell)       latter view (Euglenea view)

               Figure 7. Quality of Questions and Explanations posted by pupils in two KF views
Discussion: Seized and missed opportunities from teachers’ observations,
pupils’ reflection and theoretical perspectives

Seized and missed opportunities from the pupils’ perspective
Many of them reflected positively on the collaborative learning on the topic of cells as seen from the reflection
written by the pupils. They felt that the use of KF

          “helped us to collaborate and learn more about the topic on cells as we collaborated together.
          We learnt a lot together, learning from each other helped us correct our misconceptions...”

The viewing and providing feedback to one another was also much valued but pupils did not seem to be using the
knowledge building language of build-on, theory building, rise-above which was alright as they were accurate in
their reasoning with these different knowledge probing elevators.

Seized opportunities from the teacher’s perspective
       “KF has given me greater insights into my pupils’ understanding of the topic. It has enabled me
       to adapt my content according to my pupils’ learning needs and enrich their learning potential.
       Having each pupil’s response captured enables even the weakest and quietest to make a strong
       point via the scaffolds. As a teacher, I do not need to mark through a set of pre-assessment task
       to pitch the learning foreground. The questions raised by the pupils allow me to structure lessons
       such that fundamental concepts they are weak in are discussed and assessed before moving onto
       the advanced content.”

          “KF has definitely provided a good platform for pupils to tease out misconceptions in science
          and getting peer-reviews to correct their concepts. With the usage of knowledge building
          pedagogy, I have empowered the children to own their discussions and learning in a student-
          centric environment where they were highly engaged.”

Missed opportunities
In our effort to trace the teacher’s work, we realised that the teacher did not capitalise upon the opportunities for
scaffolding their pupils’ learning from the misconceptions surfaced. The misconception was corrected rather than
worked on like a promising idea or a point of interest. We have since developed a KB pedagogical frame to support
teachers in navigating such lesson design and we hope to use a similar frame to analyse more case studies to
develop a more generalised practice-knowledge to support teachers in knowledge building practice.


Conclusion
KB not only brings about deeper learning in science, this idea-centric approach is also transferable to other
subjects whereby pupils are able to build knowledge seamlessly with one another. With the Knowledge building
frame, we were able to bridge theory and practice to successfully engage, enliven and enrich pupils’ learning
which brings about the joy of learning in science. Teaching and learning has also been value-added by the usage
of KB which has been applied in the English Language and Social Studies lessons at Saint Hilda’s Primary School.


Endnote
(1) Euglena is a protist which has both the characteristics of a plant and animal cell.



References
Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2014). Knowledge building and knowledge creation: Theory, pedagogy, and
       technology. Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, 397-417.

Erickson, H. L. (Ed.). 2006. Concept-based curriculum and instruction for the thinking classroom. Corwin press.

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