| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 教育學系 === 104 === Traditional product-oriented English Composition pedagogy tends to focus on the writing results but not the writing processes. Accordingly, traditional learning environment also tends to be teacher-centered, emphasizing teacher’s lectures rather than students’ knowledge construction. Such pedagogy and environment not only restrain students’ development of creativities, but also turn students into passive learners. In contrast, the emphasis of a process of knowledge construction and idea development in a knowledge building environment has provided teachers and students an innovative pedagogy and an alternative learning environment. Therefore, the researcher in this study decided to employ the principle-based knowledge building theory to design more suitable English composition activities, in order to help students learn how to generate writing ideas, develop creative writing capacity, and eventually improve the quality of their English composition. As such, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of computer-supported knowledge building activities on high school students’ perception of learning environment and English writing performance. To this end, this research employed a case study and the participants were 39 second grade high school students.
In addition to understanding how students perceived their learning environment and advance their English composition performance, this study further discussed the process and the transformation of writing ideas in three different stages and the condition of teacher reflection during the teaching. The data of this study mainly came from: (1) a knowledge building environment scale; (2) students’ English composition works; (3) the records produced during three ideas generation stages; and (4) the teacher’s teaching reflection. Quantitative and qualitative measures were applied in this study, and data were analyzed through paired-samples t tests, Pearson's product moment coefficient, descriptive statistics, independent-sample t test, one way ANOVA, and content analysis.
The main findings were as follow: (1) knowledge building activities improved students’ perception of learning environment; (2) English composition activities which were based on knowledge building theory were able to advance students’ writing contents and performance; (3) brainstorming activities assisted students in idea generation, idea improvement, and idea synthesis; (4) teaching reflection affected teacher’s teaching beliefs (from cognitivism to constructivism) and teaching models (from teacher-centered to student-centered). Based on the results, some suggestions and implications were discussed.
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