Exploring the Role of Curriculum in Learning Analytics to Support Knowledge Building Practice

Abstract

One of the challenges of knowledge building practice is for teachers to prioritize the process of using student questions to guide knowledge building in view of the demand of curriculum and assessment in a regular school structure. Knowledge building analytics was developed to empower learners’ epistemic agency and support paths of idea improvement (Chen & Zhang 2016) but it was not explicitly designed to support teachers and students to develop ideas beyond the fulfillment of a prescribed curriculum. In this paper, we report the iterations of design of a set of analytics that compared keywords from Knowledge Forum (KF) notes against keywords mined from an expanded curriculum mapped across different grade years and topics. We termed the analytics, Curriculum-ideas-Analytics (CiA). Preliminary findings show that the balance between curriculum and students’ ideas is not easy navigation. Still, there is much potential in this design to support teachers to consider students’ diverse and seemingly naive ideas about big ideas embedded within the curriculum and better facilitate the identification of new lines of inquiry.