Understanding Actionable Knowledge in an Australian Primary School

Education systems around the world are increasingly turning towards finding ways to prepare children for the complexity and unpredictability of issues they will combat in the future. Issues such as climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence, require students to not only have the knowledge of such issues, but also the ability to act on them. How students generate action, and to what degree can education prepare them for action, has prompted a need to further understand action within the classroom. The aim of this study was to explore the construct of actionable knowledge (AK) and to develop its theoretical framework within an Australian primary school context. Understanding the construct within a school context, requires consideration for the types of knowledge that may be used by students and their relationship to the structure of action-based tasks that are often encountered within the classroom. To guide the initial development of the construct of actionable knowledge, the AK framework developed by Markauskaite and Goodyear (2017) was chosen. However, since this framework was limited to the exploration of action in the context of tertiary education it required further refinement to accord with a primary school context. Naturalistic Inquiry was chosen as the methodological approach for this study, focusing on one Australian primary school. The study involved the conducting of semi-structured interviews with three year six teachers to examine their perception of action within the classroom. This was complemented by the observation of a group of four year 6 students as they completed a structured action-based task (experiment) and an ill-structured action-based task (inquiry-based task). The first key finding of the study recognises that the knowledge types identified in the Markauskaite and Goodyear (2017) AK framework were also necessary in a primary school setting. However, two additional types of knowledge were present within the findings; co-constructed knowledge and collaborative knowledge. The second key finding was the greater breadth within knowledge types used by student within the ill-structured task, in comparison to the structured task. The results of the study assert the importance of students using a combination of knowledge types when engaging in action-oriented tasks and the impact that the structure of a task has on the extent of knowledge types used by the student. The findings of the study suggest potential opportunities for teacher training and development for pre-service and in-service teachers in the area of AK, with the recommendation for teachers to have a greater understanding of the range of knowledge and their function within action-based tasks. Furthermore, implications for the pedagogical approaches to action-based tasks are identified, with the findings indicating the importance for both structured and ill-structured tasks. Finally, the revised AK framework provides a starting point for consideration of how action-based tasks can be assessed in used in student learning.