In collaborative inquiry learning, the aim is to engage students in sustained collaborative efforts of working on complex problems and advancing joint knowledge and understanding. The purpose is to support handling the ideas and knowledge as items to be improved and raise the students’ own ideas and questions to the center of classroom work process (Scardamalia, 2002; Zhang, Hong, Scardamalia, Teo, & Morley, 2011). To many educators, collaborative inquiry-based learning and knowledge creation, particularly when supported with technology, appears to be one of the more promising ways of supporting
in-depth learning (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan & Chinn, 2007; Leat, 2017; Littleton, Scanlon, & Sharples, 2012; Hakkarainen, 2003; Scardamalia, 2002).
In the same line, a series of studies has been carried out regarding knowledge building (Chen & Hong, 2016, van Aalst & Chan; 2007; Zhang et al., 2018), inquiry-based and design-based science education (Fortus, et al. 2009; Kolodner, et al. 2005; Lee, Linn, Varma, & Liu, 2010), project-based learning (Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Krajcik & Blumenfeld, 2005), learning by design (Kolodner et, al.
2003) that engage students in solving complex problems, carrying out inquiries, and creating and building knowledge and artefacts. Collaborative inquiry learning is being realized with the help of practices that a learning community can appropriate with adequate facilitation, guidance, and real-time support depending on context. The main purpose, however, is to generate the process through iterative efforts of solving problems, overcoming obstacles and failures with peer and expert feedback, trying out again while finally ending up with collective productions as outcomes. Within different fields of knowledge, etc.
design, science, or other fields, the practices of the process may differ and need a different form of support.
In the collaborative inquiry learning approaches, when the processes are nonlinear, emergent and open-ended in nature (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014;
Seitamaa-Hakkarainen & Hakkarainen, 2019), the students are challenged to undertake, jointly with the teacher, responsibility for carrying the inquiry activities, like posing questions and producing working theories. In many cases, however, inquiry learning implementation aims collide with the existing structures and practices of classroom learning (Hakkarainen, 2009). In such settings, when the aim is to design the process and the object of inquiry with students, the final inquiry outcomes, the content or the process phases cannot be entirely known beforehand. When teachers aim to implement collaborative inquiry in practice, they need to learn to tolerate openness yet, at the same time, provide sufficient structuring. On the one hand, students need support and advice to be able to act as active participants in the collective inquiry process; on the other hand, too much structuring and direction may undermine their agency.
However, there appears to be a tension between researchers highlighting the importance of scripted instructional procedures (e.g., Kirchner, Sweller, &
Clark, 2006) and those emphasizing principle-based emergent practices (Hong &
Sullivan, 2009; Sawyer, 2004; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; Zhang, Hong, Scardamalia, Teo, & Morley, 2011).
Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) took the position that novice performers cannot cope in complex learning situations and processes without guidance.
They argued that emphasis on collaborative inquiry and problem-based learning gives a biased impression that student learning may be successful with only a minimal amount of teacher facilitation. They call for instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on direct guidance of the students’ learningprocess.
Direct instructional guidance reduces students’ cognitive processing load and empowers them to take part in more challenging inquiry activities (Gog, Paas, &
Sweller, 2010; van Merrienboehr & Kirschner, 2012). Teacher guidance is especially important when pursuing educationally-ambitious inquiry processes going beyond students’ everyday knowledge and understanding. Therefore, Kirschner’s and others’ arguments highlighting the importance of teacher direction appear justified. Simultaneously however, too strong teacher structuring, direction, and performance requirements may lead students to completing given tasks without pursuing genuine inquiry or cultivating their own agency or ownership (Dillenbourg & Tchounikine, 2007; Lakkala, Muukkonen, Paavola, & Hakkarainen, 2008; Onrubia & Engel, 2012;
Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014, 2005). In order to be effective, teacher guidance should be contextually grounded on the advancement of students’ inquiry and their emergent level of knowledge and understanding (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, &
Chinn, 2007).
Zhang and his colleagues (2011) distinguished procedure- and principle-based educational approaches from one another. The former ones define certain procedures, such as sequenced activities, curriculum material, and pre-established scripts, implementation of which supports educational innovation in schools, and facilitates startup of new programs. A limitation, however, is that a procedure-based approach may be easily reduced to surface features, especially if the theoretical ideas behind the procedures are not clearly present, understood, and adapted to local contexts (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014). Within a classroom based on pre-given procedures, learning is often controlled by the teacher despite the student-centered aims. Knowledge building, in contrast, represents a principle-based approach to educational innovation; instead of pre-specified procedure it highlights student and teacher invention and ownership (Chan, 2011; Scardamalia, 2002; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006, 2014; Zhang et al., 2011). Knowledge building is based on emergent processes that are guided by a set of knowledge-building principles, leaving the teachers and students space to creatively apply these principles according to contextual considerations (Zhang, et al., 2011). It is claimed that the emerging components of practices based on these principles are so intertwined that efforts to isolate or prescribe them as procedures would undercut the dynamic that allows procedures to be continually improved (Zhang et al., 2011). The teachers should make continual efforts to turn greater agency over to the students. Participants need to monitor and restructure activities ensuring the idea that improvement is the central focus, rather than completion of the tasks or routines (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006).
However, many teachers who understand a great deal about knowledge-building principles struggle when they seek to create corresponding practices in their classrooms (Bielaczyc, 2013; Chan, 2011; Hakkarainen, 2009). Knowledge building or inquiry learning research has long concentrated on analyzing and
explaining students’ activities, leaving the teacher’s role or efforts unexplained (Hakkarainen, 2009), and, thereby, tacitly giving an impression that students take responsibility easily and are able to carry out the inquiry processes on their own. That is not the case; a committed teacher who is continuously trying to improve educational practices prevailing in his or her classroom is needed. As argued by Hakkarainen (2004; 2009), all successful knowledge-building cultures appear also to be expansive-learning communities (Engeström, 1987) with the teacher taking active part in reflecting on and transforming inquiry practices.
However, as Greiffenhagen (2012) stated, we do not yet know what the teachers actually do in the classroom while implementing technology-enhanced inquiry learning, even the design research in the field has started to develop the distinguished designs for implementation paths (Bielaczyc, 2013; Chan 2011;
Sandoval, 2014).
2.2 Knowledge building, idea improvement, belief mode and