Facilitating knowledge construction in informal learning: A study of TikTok scientific, educational videos

Social media can facilitate informal learning, where individuals engage in phases of knowledge construction (sharing ideas, exploring dissonances, negotiating, synthesizing, and applying knowledge). The goal of this research is to identify key patterns of knowledge construction on TikTok, a social media platform for sharing short-form videos. We leverage machine learning classifiers to label knowledge construction phases in 259,508 comments on 114 videos under scientific, educational hashtags on TikTok. We further examine the association between knowledge construction phases and manually coded video characteristics. Overall, the classifiers suggest that comments predominantly serve social, non-knowledge-construction purposes, followed by sharing ideas, negotiating understanding, and exploring idea dissonance. Videos that focus on informational content, leverage original audio, and employ analytic language have higher proportions of comments that share and negotiate knowledge. We discuss considerations for science communicators, to develop content that encourages viewers to socially construct knowledge.