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Knowledge Building And Vocabulary Growth Over Two Years, Grades 3 And 4, Yanqing Sun, Jianwei Zhang, Marlene Scardamalia

Educational Theory and Practice Faculty Scholarship

High-level literacy and productive knowledge work are central to educational reforms. In the research reported in this article, students were engaged in sustained, collaborative knowledge building in science and social studies. The vocabulary growth of 22 students over Grades 3 and 4 was traced, based on their entries to Knowledge Forum—a knowledge building environment used as an integral part of classroom work. It is the communal space where ideas, reference material, results of experiments, and other inquiry work are entered and continually improved. Analysis of lexical frequency profiles indicated significant growth in productive written vocabulary, including academic words. In a …