dc.description.abstract | In English education, argumentative essay writing ability that can help university students succeed in both their future academic contexts or workplaces has been recognized as an important goal. Previous research found out that argumentative essay writing is difficult for university students to learn. In order to help students to overcome the difficulties, some studies have been conducted to use different teaching approaches or computer-assisted language learning tools. However, these studies showed that students might increase their content knowledge but they might not efficiently attain higher levels of argumentation in their writings. In addition, students did not necessarily have the intentions to collaborate with others, which is the key to successful argumentation, and their discussion were sometimes out of focus. Thus, there is still scope for improvement.
Recently, the computer-supported collaborative knowledge building pedagogy focusing on ideas improvement, active agents, and collective community knowledge advancement has been proposed and may be a possible solution. In this study, two knowledge building environment settings were adopted: progressive knowledge building setting and conventional setting. The main purposes of this study were to see if the two groups of students with different knowledge building environment settings differ in their perceptions of the knowledge building learning environment, argumentative essay writing performance, KB process and reflections, and the relationship between students’ argumentation writing self-efficacy and their argumentative essay performance. Moreover, how teachers in practice implement the KB activities in the existing curriculum.
This study adopted quasi-experimental method. The participants (n=66) were divided into the experimental group (n=32) with progressive knowledge building setting and the control group (n=34) with conventional setting. The conduct of this study was divided into two phases. In each phase, both groups of students used the Knowledge Forum to discuss one topic for finishing an argumentative essay after class and provided reflections in class. According to the students’ responses, they perceived the knowledge building learning environments in both phases compared to their previous learning environments. From the analysis of students’ argumentative essays in this study, the results showed that both groups of students have improved the structure and quality of their argumentative essays. It is noted that the experimental group that used progressive knowledge building setting in the second phase outperformed the control group in this study. The two groups of students in both knowledge building environment settings increased their ideas diversity, became more active agents, and tended to form a collaborative community especially the experimental group. Finally, the results of the argumentation self-efficacy writing scale showed that the experimental group had higher confidence on the dimensions related to argumentation and they seemed to perform better on their argumentative essays.
In sum, this study was one of the initial attempts to explore the possibility of the implementation of computer-supported collaborative knowledge building to promote university students’ English argumentative essay writing performance. The results in this study may not only validate the effects of computer-supported collaborative knowledge building on the argumentative essay writing, but also offer some suggestions to the English educators who are interested in helping students improve their argumentative essay writing performance. Especially for those who want to combine the KB activities with their existing curriculums. However, the correlations between the students’ KB process and their argumentative essay performance need more clarifications in the future research. | en_US |