A 1:1 learning technology to support collaborative concept mapping: a case study of social studies lesson in elementary school

Abstract

This paper reports a study to investigate the effects of collaborative concept mapping of a 1:1 (one-device-per-student) digital learning environment, comparing with a 1:m (one-device-to-many-students) environment in terms of three aspects: students' overall learning gains, knowledge retention and quality of the concept maps. Participants were sixth-grade students from an elementary school. Guided by the methodology of quasi-experimental research, we adopted Group Scribbles (GS) 1.0 in our empirical study. We evaluated these two settings in the social studies course, assessing the quality of the collaboratively constructed concept maps and students' learning attitudes. The results indicated that although little difference in the concept map scores between students engaged in the two settings was found, the standard deviations of the 1:1 groups had been greater than those of the 1:m groups. According to our analysis, the reason of the greater differences in the performances among individual 1:1 group members would be that the levels of group bonding had a greater influence on the effectiveness of their collaborations.