Knowledge building

The Knowledge Building (KB) theory was created and developed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia for describing what a community of learners needs to accomplish in order to create knowledge. The theory addresses the need to educate people for the knowledge age society, in which knowledge and innovation are pervasive.

Knowledge building may be defined simply as "the creation, testing, and improvement of conceptual artifacts. It is not confined to education but applies to creative knowledge work of all kinds".

Scardamalia & Bereiter distinguish between knowledge building and learning. They see learning as an internal, (almost) unobservable process that results in changes of beliefs, attitudes, or skills. By contrast, KB is seen as creating or modifying public knowledge. KB produces knowledge that lives ‘in the world’, and is available to be worked on and used by other people.

A good way to understand the difference between learning and knowledge building is by considering mathematics and scientific contents as examples of public knowledge. Furthermore, Bereiter in his book on Education and Mind (2002) based his observation of the educational value of KB on Karl Popper's ontological analysis of our existence as made up of three interacting worlds: World 1 (the physical), World 2 (the subjective) and World 3 (the locus of cultural products). Thus, learning takes place in World 2, while knowledge is built in World 3.

Knowledge building refers to the process of creating new cognitive artifacts as a result of common goals, group discussions, and synthesis of ideas. These pursuits should advance the current understanding of individuals within a group, at a level beyond their initial knowledge level, and should be directed towards advancing the understanding of what is known about that topic or idea. The theory "encompasses the foundational learning, subskills, and socio-cognitive dynamics pursued in other approaches, along with the additional benefit of movement along the trajectory to mature education".

Knowledge building can be considered as deep constructivism that involves making a collective inquiry into a specific topic, and coming to a deeper understanding through interactive questioning, dialogue, and continuing improvement of ideas. Ideas are thus the medium of operation in KB environments. The teacher becomes a guide, rather than a director, and allows students to take over a significant portion of the responsibility for their own learning, including planning, execution, and evaluation.

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