Promisingness Judgments as Facilitators of Knowledge Building

Knowledge creation depends on pursuit of promising possibilities. This paper reports a case study of a graduate-level course, with promisingness judgments incorporated as an explicit goal of course work. The top-level goal for the course was to have students take collective responsibility for "the creation of an assessment of collaborative knowledge creation." This paper presents the pedagogical design of the course, describes technological affordances to support promisingness judgments, and discusses preliminary findings. Promisingness Judgments in Knowledge Building Whether it is industrial designers working on a new product, scientists planning the next experiment in a research program, or policy-makers planning social legislation, decisions must be made about the investment of resources and effort in further development of ideas. "Ideas are the easy part," says a high-profile design group (Fahrenheit 212, 2010), noting that ideas are usually in abundant supply. Going from an initial idea to an innovation, however, requires time and effort, and calls for evaluation about the potential fruitfulness of ideas in an uncertain future. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993) refer to such evaluations as "promisingness judgments" and have argued that they play an essential role in creative expertise. In explaining creative processes, Gardner (1994) also describes the process of identifying promising ideas as bringing out "discrepant elements" and making the richness of select ideas evident. According to prior research, judgments of promisingness pervade creativity and decision-making of all kinds (e.g., de Groot, 1978; Dunbar, 1995). Knowledge-building communities are characterized by a focus on problem solving that requires knowledge advancement through dynamic intellectual collaboration among community members (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003). Community members work within a framework of shared goals where contributions to the community knowledge space produce idea diversity and consequent need to select promising ideas and solution paths. The shared goals that frame the work are themselves emergents of the process, with effectiveness of the chosen solution path dependent on ongoing evaluation of new information and possibilities. Previous research has found promisingness judgments contributing to knowledge advancement in a Grade 3 science context (Chen, Scardamalia, Resendes, Chuy & Bereiter, 2012). This study explores pedagogical and technological designs to support work in a graduate-level knowledge-building course and investigates how promisingness judgments might be incorporated more explicitly to enhance knowledge-building processes. Method The study reported is part of a larger program of design research (Collins, Joseph & Bielaczyc, 2004) on promisingness judgments with the goal of developing pedagogical and technological "promisingness" innovations to facilitate Knowledge Building. The goal of this particular case study (Yin, 2011) was to gain greater understanding of the dynamics of promisingness by making the process more explicit to participants and engaging them in a knowledge building enterprise in which the shared goal represented a significant knowledge building challenge for all—including the instructor. The case was a 12-week graduate seminar at the University of Toronto—one professor, 15 graduate students from the faculty of education. Students were from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds, with varied experience and expertise in education.