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Background: Chi and colleagues have argued that some of the most challenging engineering concepts exhibit properties of emergent systems. However, students often lack a mental framework, or schema, for understanding emergence. Slotta and Chi posited that helping students develop a schema for emergent systems, referred to as schema training, would increase the understanding of challenging concepts exhibiting emergent properties. Purpose: We tested the effectiveness of schema training and explored the nature of challenging concepts from thermodynamics and heat transfer. We investigated if schema training could (a) repair misconceptions in advanced engineering students and (b) prevent them in beginning engineering students. Method: We adapted Slotta and Chi's schema training modules and tested their impact in two studies that employed an experimental design. Items from the Thermal and Transport Concept Inventory and expert-developed multiplechoice questions were used to evaluate conceptual understanding of the participants. The language used by students in their open-ended explanations of multiple-choice questions was also coded. Results: In both studies, students in the experimental groups showed larger gains in their understanding of some concepts-specifically in dye diffusion and microfluidics in Study One, and in the final test for thermodynamics in Study Two. But in neither study did students exhibit any gain in conceptual questions about heat transfer. Conclusion: Our studies suggest the importance of examining the nature of the phenomena underlying the concepts being taught because the language used in instruction has implications for how students understand them. Therefore, we suggest that instructors reflect on their own understanding of the concepts.

Knowledge Building has been advanced as a pedagogy of engaged learning where students identify as a community whose purpose is to advance their shared ideas. This approach, which has been studied for three decades (Scardamalia & Bereiter, in: K. Sawyer (ed) Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2014), includes cognitive, social constructivist, and emotional elements (Zhu et al. in User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 29: 789–820, 2019b). This paper investigates how refining Knowledge Building activities based on students’ feedback impacts their social, cognitive, and emotional engagement. Using a design-based research method, we refined successive course activities based on feedback from 23 Masters of Education students. With successive iterations, we found that the density of students’ reading networks increased; they theorized more deeply, introduced more authoritative resources, and made greater efforts to integrate ideas within the community knowledge base. As well, their level of negative affect decreased. These findings suggest that soliciting students’ input into course design can benefit their engagement and disposition toward learning, with implications for curriculum design.

This design-based research study of a second year undergraduate course involved the enactment of the Fostering Communities of Learners (FCL) pedagogical model augmented with elements of the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model by the addition of a digital collaborative knowledge base (CKB). The study involved the redesign of a course comprised of lectures and break-out tutorials which covered basic business concepts for undergraduate media students. The investigation examined the ways in which a learning community pedagogical approach could be enacted in an undergraduate large lecture course through a scaffolded, complex curricular design that utilizes active and inquiry-based learning. By appropriating design elements from KCI, a CKB was introduced as a major research element in the curricular design. The CKB was intended to be a persistent online hub of ideas, serving as a resource for completion of a major group project. Results indicate that students participated in more individual inquiry, collaborated with peers and perceived themselves to be part of a class-wide learning community. The study concluded that a learning community ethos can be established in an undergraduate large lecture through the recursive cycle of individual inquiry, research discussion in lectures and by reference to CKB research exercises in group tutorial sessions by way of reciprocal teaching, cross-talk and jigsaw activities.

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