Raising meta-cognitive awareness of collaborative knowledge building practices

This present study discusses the design and the facilitation of a collaborative knowledge building workshop, a move towards the enculturation of knowledge building practices. This skill-based workshop aims to raise students' meta-cognitive awareness of the four key phases of knowledge building, namely, idea generation, idea connection, idea improvement, and rise-above in the progressive knowledge building inquiry cycle, by means of explicit instructional approach. Data was mainly obtained from students' discourse and groups' postings on idea cards at each stage of the progressive inquiry cycle. Students' discourse was transcribed for content analysis to identify indicators of meta-cognitive awareness of the four key stages of knowledge building processes. A post-workshop survey was also administered to examine students' perception of the collaborative knowledge building experience in the workshop. Data analysis showed that students did demonstrate meta-cognitive awareness of knowledge building processes. However, most groups still faced difficulty arriving at the rise-above stage owing to time constraints, coupled with the difficulty to achieve higher-order collective critical thinking and advancement of ideas.