ABSTRACT
Although constructivism has been prevailed across schools in Japan, what they call constructivism is a "shallow" one (Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 2002). In collaboration with teachers at a laboratory school, we have been conducting design studies on a lesson for knowledge building from the perspective of "deep" constructivism. For embodying such a new lesson, a CSCL technology called Knowledge Forum® has been introduced. Through the progressive refinement of lesson plans, we have been involved in creating pedagogical design principles (Linn, Davis, & Bell (Eds.), 2004) by referring to the metaprinciples on knowledge building (Scardamalia, 2002). In this report, we describe our refinement process of a fifth-grade lesson on genetically modified foods through two years, and discuss how the pedagogical design principles can be transformed into design elements.
