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Role Taking And Knowledge Building In A Blended University Course, D. Cesareni, S. Cacciamani, N. Fujita

Office of Open Learning Publications

Role taking is an established approach for promoting social cognition. Playing a specific role within a group could lead students to exercise collective cognitive responsibility for collaborative knowledge building. Two studies explored the relationship of role taking to participation in a blended university course. Students participated in the same knowledge-building activity over three consecutive, five-week modules and enacted four roles designed in alignment with knowledge building pedagogy (Scardamalia and Bereiter 2010). In Study 1, 59 students were distributed into groups with two conditions: students who took a role in Module 2 and students who did not take a role, …