Preparation before collaboration matters: an interactive system coupled with a four-phase pedagogy for collaborative reading

Although existing studies explored the positive effects of social annotation for collaborative reading, they have seldom considered the preparation before collaboration as separate and explored how to scaffold the preparation. To improve the effectiveness of collaborative reading, we designed a pedagogy mode named IRIS, which is short for individual preparation, group reflection, intra-construction, and summarization. An interactive system is developed to support the conduction of the four phases. Before the class, students make annotations and can see their peers’ annotations in the system. During the class, the teacher can distribute feedback on the before-class annotations via the system to help with group reflection. Then, the student groups can use the chat function to discuss and complete in-class collaborative tasks. At last, the teacher makes the summarization based on the group submissions. We conducted a quasi-experiment and evaluated the system through descriptive data analysis and Large Language Model driven technologies. In short, we found that: (1) Group awareness during individual preparation facilitated students’ cognitive engagement. (2) Too much group awareness decreased the students’ participation during group collaboration.