Distinguishing knowledge-sharing, knowledge-construction, and knowledge-creation discourses

van Aalst, Jan

The study evaluated performance on the collaborative summary notes and related that to what students were doing in Knowledge Forum. The unit of analysis was a group of students that worked together in the same workspaces (views) in Knowledge Forum; there were four such groups in the study (Groups A-D). The analysis proceeded in five parts: (1) Several relevant independent variables were examined to check whether the groups could be considered to be equivalent. (2) Two dependent measures, Knowledge Quality and Significance of Findings, based on the collaborative summary notes, were measured to assess advances in collective knowledge made by the groups. (3) To identify mechanisms that could explain observed between-group differences in the dependent variables, the group discourses (all the notes written by each group) were coded and analyzed using a new coding scheme with 7 main codes and 33 subcodes. Statistical analysis was then performed on the main code frequencies to determine which main codes provided the greatest group separation. (4) The results were used to select several main codes for qualitative analysis to further elucidate what the groups were doing differently. (5) The observed patterns in the subcode frequencies were used to examine the fit of the four group discourses to the knowledge-sharing, knowledge-construction, and knowledge-creation discourse modes. 2