Knowledge Building is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes students' collective responsibility to continuously improve their community knowledge. Advancing the frontiers of community knowledge is an exciting but challenging process, especially for low-achieving students, because it involves a continuous experience of cognitive disequilibrium and…

The goal of this study was to develop a classification for a range of discourse patterns that occur in text-based asynchronous discussion forums, and that can aid in the distinction of three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge building. The dataset was taken from Knowledge Forum® databases in the Knowledge…

In this paper we examine how two groups of middle school students arrive at shared understandings of and solutions to mathematical problems. Our data consists of logs of student participation in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) system as they work on math problems. The project supports interaction both through chat and through a virtual whiteboard. We…