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

van Aalst, Jan

Knowledge construction involves a range of cognitive processes, including the use of explanation-seeking questions and problems, interpreting and evaluating new information, sharing, critiquing, and testing ideas at different levels (e.g., conjectures versus explanations that refer to concepts and/or causal mechanisms), and efforts to rise above current levels of explanation, including summarization, synthesis, and the creation of new concepts. However, educational approaches vary considerably in the extent to which they make it possible for students to engage in these processes. Although most emphasize working with information and ideas (e.g. Goldberg and Bendall 1995; Hunt and Minstrell 1996; Linn et al. 2003) , there may be limited opportunities for students to pursue problems they have identified themselves or to synthesize ideas and formulate new concepts. For example, in problem-based learning (Hmelo-Silver and Barrows 2008), students are provided problems, although these are ill-structured and need considerable articulation. In other approaches, students may collaborate in small groups on relatively simple tasks that require little synthesis and reflection on progress. In the vast majority of approaches, knowledgeconstruction processes are directed at acquiring the reliable knowledge of a field (Edelson et al. 1999; Kolodner et al. 2003; Krajcik et al. 2008) . Knowledge construction, with its emphasis on building on students' prior ideas, concepts and explanations, and their metacognition, produces deeper knowledge in complex domains than does knowledge sharing (Bransford et al. 1999; Hmelo-Silver et al. 2007 ).