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TECHNOLOGIES
FOR
KNOWLEDGE-BUILDING
DISCOURSE
Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter
are pervasive stratefor school work that
be broadly characteras knowledge reproduction strategies. They have
limited potential for advancing knowledge, and
often are not even very effective for
purposes of memorization and organization of knowledge. Their most
conspicuous failure, however, is in
the development of understanding.
Knowledge building strategies are, by
contrast, focused centrally on the
development
of understanding.
These strategies, however, are comparatively rare among school children [6]. Worse yet, they seem destined to remain so because school
discourse effectively excludes them.
Educational computing, unfortunately, tends to support knowledge
reproduction strategies rather than
knowledge-building ones. While this
is obvious regarding much of the
courseware on the market, in a more
subtle way it is equally true of the
software tools that are popularly
thought to encourage more active
learning. An explanation may be
found in the origins of these software
tools and in the evolution of the personal computer as a workstation.
This evolution has been toward
meeting the needs of a business community concerned with storing and
retrieving information (hence, the
saliency of files and folders), transferring it (hence, cut-and-paste, import-export, and communications
software), displaying it (hence,
graphing, graphics, desktop publishing, and multimedia presentation
software), and making plans and

here
gies
may
ized

decisions based on it (hence, spreadsheets, accounting, and projectmanagement software). Put it all together, and you have the desktop
metaphor. It is not a metaphor for
the construction and advancement of
understanding. It represents activities that are important in any kind of
information processing environment.
We propose that these activities-copying, deleting, storing, retrieving,
entering, displaying, and sending-be thought of as first-order knowledge-processing activities. In order
to serve the purposes of knowledgebuilding, however, they must be subordinated to a second-order system
of activities that has understanding
as its primary purpose. In this article
we discuss second-order computing
facilities and a system we are developing that aims to foster and support
knowledge building in school. The
system is computer-supported intentional
learning
environments
(CSILE). It aims to engage students
in the same sorts of intellectual and
cultural processes that sustain realworld scientists in efforts at knowledge advancement.

Knowledge Reproduction
A common characteristic of many
student strategies is that they provide
efficient ways of completing school
work while avoiding knowledge
building. "Copy-delete" is a reading
strategy used widely to summarize
texts [4, 5]. Students evaluate propositions one-by-one as they encounter
them, retaining those judged to be
important and "deleting" those
j u d g e d unimportant. They do not

seek to identify the central point of

the text. This copy-delete summarization strategy has been adapted for
what passes as research in schools-students copying from reference
books, skipping unwanted material.
It has found new forms in multimedia composing where students copy
sound bites, pictures, and movie clips
as well as information from reference books, most frequently without
referencing sources. "Knowledge
telling" is the dominant school strategy for writing [2]. It parallels the
copy-delete strategy in its bias for
reproducing information. As the
name conveys, the strategy is effective for telling what one already
knows and thereby avoiding knowledge-transforming activities that occupy expert writers [19].
The copy-delete and knowledgetelling strategies for reading and
writing are parallel and might be
considered the same strategy applied
to different tasks [18]. They bear a
striking resemblance to strategies for
solving school mathematics [22] and
science [7] problems. In these content areas students apply learned algorithms and formulas triggered by
superficial cues in the word problems
presented to them. Sometimes the
answers are nonsensical, but the
strategies produce right answers
often enough and are so economical
that they persist.
The pervasiveness of school strategies that favor low-grade work with
available knowledge is born and bred
in a discourse model for schooling
commonly referred to as the transmission model. Information exists out
there; the teacher is the intermediary

OMMUNICATIOHSOI~THNIACM/May1993/Vo1.36,

No.5

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who transmits select bits of it to students. Within the transmission context the d o m i n a n t discourse activities
are presentation and recitation:
teachers
present
information;
t h r o u g h recitation and written or
oral presentations, students provide
teachers with evidence o f learning
[8]. Verbatim and p a r a p h r a s e d records have clear advantages over interpretation and inferential reasoning because the latter may convey
lack of understanding.
Question-asking in schools is not
really dialogic. T h e teacher asks a
question and the student is expected
to provide an immediate answer. I f
the answer is acceptable to the
teacher, a new question is asked. I f
not, another student is queried. This
is nothing even remotely like the
process o f progressive r e f i n e m e n t o f
conjectures by which knowledge is
constructed in the scientific world

[11].
T h e essence o f the transmission
model is the belief that learning consists of p r o d u c i n g in the mind o f the
individual student some kind o f reproduction of the knowledge that
exists out tlhere in the objective or
public world. W h e t h e r this copy o f
the truth has been received on authority or constructed t h r o u g h experimentation and discourse may
make a difference in terms of efficiency and "ownership," but the int e n d e d result is the same. T h e correct things have been implanted into
the mind ot~"the student.
For a discussion of the epistemological issues raised by this conventional a p p r o a c h see [3]. Most significant here iis that this transmission
view o f learning creates a climate in
which copy-delete, knowledge-telling, and related math and science
strategies are perfectly reasonable
strategies for students to employ.
These are strategies that make direct
links between the knowledge out
there and knowledge in the mind,
minimizing possibilities o f distortion.

Software
I f we think of classroom discourse in
terms o f transmission models, then
the object is to get the best o f existing
information to students. This general bias is reflected in the following

3B

May 1993/Vol.36, No.5 / C ~ O M M U I I I C A T I O l l l [ O F T l i l A C ~ M

uses o f technology and interface design:

(a) Computer-assisted, individualized
instruction and tutoring systems. These
systems are characterized by provisions for identifying and tailoring
instruction to the knowledge needs
of the individual learner. W h e t h e r
this is done in a flexible and subtle
way or in a heavy-handed test-andteach way, it casts the student into the
role of recipient of knowledge rather
than active constructor o f it. For in
active knowledge building, it is essential to be able to identify your own
knowledge n e e d s - - t o recognize what
is unclear, puzzling, doubtful, incoherent, and so on. As we have argued
elsewhere [21], the trick is to turn
intelligence over to the user, not to
hide it in the computer This is not to
deny an i m p o r t a n t role for intelligent t u t o r i n g - - e s p e c i a l l y when it
comes to learning specific skills--just
to argue that such systems must be
placed in a s u p p o r t rather than primary role.
(b) Business~Presentational Software.
Facilities for assembling and presenting material are valuable, yet bring
with them cognitive risks. Users
often spend more time on visual appeal than on substance. Cut-andpaste and transfer o f information
between applications encourage shallow processing o f content and coll a g e s - i t e m s linked together because
o f superficial topical resemblance.
(c) Email and Bulletin Boards. To
u n d e r s t a n d limitations of email and
bulletin boards for knowledge building, it is i m p o r t a n t to u n d e r s t a n d
contrasting knowledge-building technologies, and we will elaborate on
these. At this point we state a central
feature: T h e flow o f information
must allow for progressive work on a
problem, with ideas remaining active
over e x t e n d e d periods o f time and
revisited in new and unexpected
contexts.

Knowledge Building
F r o m a constructivist standpoint,
conceiving a new idea and learning
are fundamentally the same process,
as indicated in the following r e m a r k
by Karl Popper:
. . What I suggest is that we can grasp a
theory only by trying to reinvent it or to

reconstruct it, and by trying out, with the

help of our imagination, all the consequences of the theory which seem to us to
be interesting and important . . . .
One
could say that the process of understanding and the process of the actual production or discovery o f . . .
[theories, etc.]
are very much alike. Both are making and
matching processes. [ 17]
In a footnote, P o p p e r explained,
"The matching aspect is that it has to
fit into a framework . . . "
A 5th-grade girl in one of o u r
CSILE classrooms expressed essentially the same idea, in response to
being asked how she would know
when she had learned something:
I think that I can tell ifl've learned something when I'm able to form substantial
theories that seem to fit in with the information that I've already got; so it's not
necessarily that I have everything, that I
haw'. all the information, but that I'm able
to piece things in that make sense and then
to Jorm theories on the questions that
would all fit together.
T h e concept o f learning represented in these quotations is radically
different from knowledge reproduction. It is, clearly, a constructivist
view, but it goes well beyond simplistic notions o f learning by discovery.
In this view, l e a r n i n g - - l i k e scientific
discovery and t h e o r i z i n g - - i s a process o f working toward more complete and coherent understanding.
T h e kind o f discourse that supports
such learning is not discourse in
which students display or r e p r o d u c e
what they have learned. It is the kind
o f discourse that advances knowledge in the sciences and disciplines.
It is the discourse o f "conjectures and
refiatations," as P o p p e r [16] called it.
It is progressive in the sense that
Lakatos [11] spoke o f progressive
research programs: T h e discourse
advances by trying to deal with puzzling facts in ways that lead to more
powerful explanations. In the sciences and learned disciplines this discourse is carried on t h r o u g h many
m e d i a - - j o u r n a l s , conferences, correspondence, debates, with discourses often extending over years.
I f we are to s u p p o r t such knowledge-building discourse within the
frameworks o f education we need to
establish the construction o f knowledge as a social activity, with new

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ideas and information b r o u g h t into

the discourses o f a community that
shares goals for knowledge advancement and recognizes contributions.
To accomplish this we need to develop technology that can help condense the discourse, sustain it
t h r o u g h interruptions and across
distances, and give it continuity over
time. All o f this is m a d e difficult by
the existing forms o f schooling,
geared to knowledge transmission,
which reduce discourse to brief,
topic-centered episodes, with none o f
the sustained effort toward coherence and completeness o f explanation that are required for progressive
building o f knowledge.
F u n d a m e n t a l requirements beyond a supportive discourse community include means for representing
current understandings and for
bringing new information, suggestions, and criticisms to bear. Ideas
need to be preserved and accessible
to users o f diverse talent and perspective in o r d e r to bias d e v e l o p m e n t
toward increasingly sophisticated
and multicultural perspectives. Progressive discourse does not mean
simply that participants reach consensus or a decision. It means that
participants, even if they hold differing views, all feel that some advance
has been made, in their own understanding.
In addition to such global characteristics we have identified the following features that enhance knowledge building:

l. Balance between public and private, and individual and group knowledge processes. Participants need simultaneous access to the work o f
others to provide comparative models and opportunities to a p p r o p r i a t e
ideas more advanced than they
might think o f on their own. While
access and interchange are important, so is time for reflection and refinement. Some participants shy
away from public display. Facilities
must allow users to enter notes anonymously and to move ideas between
public or private spaces d e p e n d i n g
on need and response.
2. Contribution and notification. T h e
challenge is to keep ideas from being
t r a p p e d in file folders or topical

g r o u p i n g s - - o r in individual file
s t r u c t u r e s - - a n d thus not available
for u p g r a d i n g and public debate.
Commenting, labeling, and linking
facilities, along with attendant notification systems must serve to link
users and ideas in profitable ways.
3. Source referencing. Automatic
source referencing preserves the
centrality o f the author's idea while
crediting contributors and providing
historical accounts o f knowledge
building. Designed properly, such
facilities should u p g r a d e copy-delete
to
a
reference-and-contribute
strategy.

4. Storage and retrieval for situating

ideas in a communal context. Ideas are
placed in the context of entries by
others, with indexes that provide
overlap and increase chances that
notes written by authors working in
different contexts on different aspects o f a problem will be joined.
This is not to deny the importance o f
unique identifiers, but to highlight
the design challenge o f situating
ideas in b r o a d e r contexts.

5. Multiple points of entry for users o~

different ages and levels of sophistication.
Multirepresentationai note forms
(text, graphics, sound, mathematical,) must be equally accessible, and
entry on the basis o f simple drawings, two-word texts, or other simple
efforts must be possible for the
youngest and most naive users. At
the same time, sophisticated users
must find the environment challenging without being weighed down by
irrelevant material.

6. Coherence-producing mechanisms
for dealing with information overload. In
knowledge-building
environments
ideas are multiply tagged, linked,
referenced, subordinated, superordinated, and so forth as they prove
useful for knowledge activity. Ideas
that foster no such activity are evident, as well. Combined database activity and notification facilities can be
used to inform authors o f ideas fading for lack of attention. Ideas can
then be reinstated, r e t u r n e d to personal space, or deleted. In this way
ideas o f limited value are removed
from the main corpus at the same
time that productive activity is
encouraged.

7. Linked resources providing access

to the world's most advanced knowledge

resources. Parallel local- and wide-area
architectures with links to home, science centers, museums, art galleries,
and so forth, are n e e d e d so situate
student discourses within a greatly
expanded
discourse community.
Further, links to all m a n n e r o f
knowledge
resources--CD-ROM
encyclopedias, microworlds, intelligent tutors, and so f o r t h - - a r e
n e e d e d so that (a) best resources are
available to s u p p o r t and e x p a n d dialogues in the central workspace and
(b) dialogues in the central workspace enhance the educational value
of linked resources.

Current-day CSILE
Although o u r goal is to e m b o d y all
the preceding features in one coherent CSILE system, they are only partially i m p l e m e n t e d in the c u r r e n t
version. We present a description o f
current-day CSILE, detailing installations and findings based on six
years o f use in public schools:
1. Description. In line with the objective o f engaging students in conjecture, theory building, and analysis, and providing them with larger
and more varied audiences for reflective e n g a g e m e n t with ideas,
CSILE has a communal database
t h r o u g h which student-generated
notes are, by default option, accessible to others. Such generalized access
means that commenting on one another's knowledge-building efforts
can become a natural and important
activity. T h e comment presented in
1) in the box gives some sense o f the
s u p p o r t and challenges to progressive inquiry students provide for one
another.
T h e database consists o f text and
graphical notes, all p r o d u c e d by the
students and accessible t h r o u g h
database search procedures. Anyone
can a d d a c o m m e n t to a note or attach a graphic note subordinate to
another graphic note, but only authors can edit o r delete notes. Graphical notes can also be used to create
organizing frameworks for notes.
Authors are notified when a comment has been made on one o f their
notes.
Specialized discourse environments [10] have provided the most

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successful n'todel to date for engaging student,; in discourses centered

on their theories. T h e note shown in
2) in the box is a typical sample of a
coauthored note, in this case written
by a pair of students working on the
problem "How does gravity work?"
Note that students' theories are central and these young students are actively engaged in refining their ideas
through uncovering and resolving
gaps in their understanding.
We envisi~on increasingly flexible
discourse tools to support more varied and age-appropriate discourses.
2. Installations. CSILE is currently
available in elementary, secondary,
and postgraduate sites. There are
nine sites in all, ranging from Baffin
Island, N W T (approximately 80%
Innuit population) to Oakland, California (inner-city, predominantly
Hispanic and Southeast Asian). The

1. C o m m e n t b y
5th-to 6thg r a d e CSlLE
student
I have found your note on the circulatory system very interesting. I
never knew that much before. I
need to u n d e r s t a n d . . . Does the
speed at which we take breaths
have any connection with the rate
at which the blood gets pumped
through our body? If so, what difference will the effect of breathing very filst have on us?
YOU can tell me in person.
Jessica

2. G r o u p n o t e
p r o d u c e d in
SILE by 5 t h to 6th-grade
students
Problem: How does gravity work?
My theory: I think that gravity is
really important. Without gravity
we'd all fly off the face of the
earth and be living in space. Gravity is also the thing that keeps the

40

M a y 1 9 9 3 / V o l . 3 6 , N o. 5

base site in Toronto (close to our development lab and the site where
new versions are first tested) is an
ethnically mixed, predominantly
middle class elementary site with
CSILE in use daily in grades 1-6. A
CSILE-based local area network
(LAN) was first installed at this site
six years ago linking two 5th- and
6th-grade classrooms. T h e
1st
through 4th grade installations have
now been in operation for three
years, though this year is the first installation with Macintosh equipment,
allowing all grades to be joined by a
c o m m o n LAN.
The standard CSILE installation
has eight networked computers per
classroom, connected to a file server,
which maintains the communal database. CSILE is implemented with a
client/server architecture optimized
for real-time sharing of information.

earth orbiting the sun. (Lisa)

My theory: I think gravity is generated by the earth's core. The
closer you get to the earth's core,
the more gravity there is. This iS
why there is no gravity in space.
The earth's core acts like a giant
magnet, pulling everything downward. (Carol)
I need to understand: Do other
planets have gravity? (Carol)
New Information: I read somewhere that other planets have
gravity, but the amount Of gravity
is different depending on how big
the planet is. (LISa)
My theory: My theory is that bigger planets have bigger cores, and
therefore have more gravity.
(Carol)
New Information: I read that scientists think gravity is caused by a
particle called the graviton. To
understand this, you need to
know that everything is made of
particles. There are two types of
particles, matter particles, which
have a half spin, and force particles, which have a full spin. Matter
particles give off force particles
like gravitons. Therefore, anything
that has mass has gravity. (LiSa)
My theory: The more mass an
object haS, the more gravity It
has, because mass causes gravity.
Therefore, everything has gravity,
even people.

/OMMUNICATIONSOI:THIEACM

The portable database server is written in C, with Unix (C, XWindows,

TCP/IP) and object-oriented Macintosh ( C + + , MacApp, TCP/IP and
AppleTalk) clients.
3. Findings. Results available to
date suggest the model is powerful.
CSILE students consistently show
significant advantages over controlgroup students on:
Standardized achievement tests of
reading and language
Portfolio selections and learning
commentaries in the areas of writing,
mathematics, and science
Comprehension of difficult text
and transfer of learning to novel
problems
Graphical literacy
Depth of explanations in students'
written reports
Beliefs about learning consistent
with a progressive view of knowledge
adwmcement
Additionally, CSILE-based interactions enhance face-to-face learning
by sustained problem solving over
lengthier periods of time and with
higher-level goals [13].
In summary, CSILE students consistently outperform control students
(for more detailed accounts see [9,
12, 13, 14, 20]. Results also demonstrate that for most measures, each
additional year students spend working with CSILE yields an additional
advantage in results, and there is
equal engagement by students at low
and high ends of the ability spectrum, and by females and males.
Conclusion

T h e goal of computer-based knowledge-building environments in education is to fundamentally alter educational discourse so that knowledge
reproduction processes give way to
knowledge-building processes. In
line with this we argue that currentday special-purpose software, along
with email, bulletin boards, presentational software, and the like, must be
subsumed by more powerful secondorder, or what we refer to as knowledge-building environments for progressive discourse. CSILE is designed to encourage group processes
and progressive discourse via its
communal database. As authors of

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public-access material, students c o m e

to see themselves as contributors to
k n o w l e d g e , not passive recipients.
T h e i r ideas are objects o f inquiry, to
be r e f i n e d t h r o u g h interaction with
others. T e a c h e r s d o not direct discourses but e n g a g e in them, l e a d i n g
by virtue o f being m o r e e x p e r t learners. T h e best o f the teacher's u n d e r s t a n d i n g is available to students, but
does not circumscribe what is to be
l e a r n e d o r investigated. As suggested
by data p r e s e n t e d earlier, such envir o n m e n t s can lead to substantial e d u cational a c h i e v e m e n t s for students.
Acknowledgments

T h e a u t h o r s wish to a c k n o w l e d g e the
generous support of Apple Computer, Inc., E x t e r n a l Research Division, a n d the J a m e s S. M c D o n n e l l
F o u n d a t i o n . We are i n d e b t e d to the
students and teachers at H u r o n Public School who c o n t r i b u t e d their time
and talents to this project, a n d to the
entire C S I L E team, without whose
contributions the w o r k r e p o r t e d h e r e
w o u l d not have b e e n possible. I
References

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About the Authors:
MARLENE SCARDAMALIA is head of

the Centre for Applied Cognitive Science

and a professor in the department of
Measurement, Evaluation, and Computer
Applications at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education. She is current a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences. Her research interests include knowledge acquisition, the
design of educational environments for
the social construction of knowledge, and
cognitive development. Author's Present
Address: Centre for Applied Cognitive
Science, Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, CANADA M5S 1V6
CARL BEREITER is a professor in ap-

plied cognitive science at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and is currently a fellow at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His research interests include instructional psychology, problems of
knowledge, and computer-based learning
environments. Author's Present Address: Center for Advanced Study in the

Behavioral Sciences, 202 Junipero Serra

Blvd., Stanford, California 94305

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