This research integrates theory building, technology design, and design-based research to address a central challenge pertaining to collective inquiry and knowledge building: how can studentdriven, ever-deepening inquiry processes become socially organized and pedagogically supported in a community? Different from supporting inquiry using pre-designed structures, we propose reflective structuration as a social and temporal mechanism by which members of a community co-construct/re-construct shared inquiry structures to shape and guide their ongoing knowledge building processes. Idea Thread Mapper (ITM) was designed to help students and their teacher monitor emergent directions and co-organize the unfolding inquiry processes over time. A study was conducted in two upper primary school classrooms that investigated electricity with the support of ITM. Qualitative analyses of classroom videos and observational data documented the formation and elaboration of shared inquiry structures. Content analysis of the online discourse and student reflective summaries showed that in the classroom with reflective structuration, students made more active and connected contributions to their online discourse, leading to deeper and more coherent scientific understandings.3

No abstract

As a hallmark of authentic science practices, students need to enact epistemic agency to shape/reshape the key aspects of their inquiry work as a collaborative community. This study elaborates an emergent temporal mechanism for engaging students' epistemic agency: “reflective structuration” by which members of a classroom community coconstruct ever‐evolving inquiry directions and group structures as their collective inquiry work proceeds. Using an interactional ethnography method, we examined how students (n = 22) in a Grade 5 classroom coconstructed shared inquiry directions and flexible group structures to guide their sustained inquiry about human body systems over 7 months supported by a collaborative online environment. Rich data were collected to trace the work of the eye inquiry group as a telling case. With their teacher's support, students took agentic moves to construct an evolving set of wondering areas as a way to frame what their whole class needed to investigate. Flexible groups, such as the eye inquiry group, emerged and evolved in the various areas, leading to progressively deepening inquiry and extensive idea exchanges among students. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

No abstract

According to Xingzhi Tao, education should focus on life, life determines education, and then education remakes life, the role of education can only be played through life. Art comes from life, it is the way that children experience the world perceptually and also the other language to express their understanding of the world. However, with the development of Arts education, existing problems are gradually revealed. Based on the analysis of current Arts activities, the research was carried out on the following issues that children don’t have the effective experience before Art activities; the content of Art activities doesn’t conform to the children’s experience and life in the teaching process; the teaching form and materials are single and children lack interest problems, etc. By observing and experiencing life, the children can accumulate perceptual experience. By following the children’s experiences and life, we can explore the teaching content. By broadening the forms and materials of art activities, the children are glad to perform, which will improve children’s life observation and aesthetic ability, stimulate children’s creative interest being willing to create and performance, improve the ability of teachers’ observation, curriculum producing and teaching skills and it also explores the use of art teaching method and life-oriented materials in rural kindergartens.

No abstract