Social Annotation Tool Research Articles

Fostering students' inquiry aptitudes and collaborative reasoning in higher education science courses with social annotation tools and collaborative platforms

AbstractInteractive digital technologies are playing an increasingly important part in education for enhancing collaborative learning processes and improving engagement. Social annotation (SA) tools and collaborative platforms are an innovative way to involve students to give and take feedback, annotate, and brainstorm on complex topics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This article focuses on innovative practices that integrate inquiry‐based discussions using SA tools and collaborative platforms to promote undergraduate students' interest and curiosity about sciences. In this article, lectures were combined with inquiry‐based discussions using an open education SA tool and an open‐access collaborative platform to engage students in a meaningful dialog with peers on scientific topics. Students debated with peers on scientific content in an online environment. Findings show that the integration of inquiry‐based discussions using SA tools and collaborative platforms provides a practical way to effectively improve students interest in science. The information reported in this article can support STEM instructors in designing collaborative learning activities in online and hybrid settings that spark students' curiosity and inquiry attitude about natural sciences.

Use of Social Learning Tools Improves Engagement and Performance in Undergraduate Medical Physiology Education

Objective: We sought to increase engagement, reduce cognitive load, and foster self-directed learning while potentially improving exam performance by incorporating a social annotation tool (SAT) into a flipped classroom setting in an undergraduate medical education curriculum. Hypothesis: We hypothesized that using the SAT (Perusall) as preparatory material for a flipped classroom would increase engagement and academic performance compared to using a pre-recorded lecture video when teaching cardiovascular physiology. Methods: Within a first-year undergraduate medical physiology course, students (n=125) used the SAT to annotate assigned cardiovascular physiology readings before a flipped classroom session. This strategy was compared to the common practice of providing students with a pre-recorded lecture. Students took an assessment before and after to assess knowledge acquisition and engagement with both formats. Results: The SAT intervention identified an average time spent engaged with the material of 142.1 minutes ( n=125), with a pre- and post-assessment score improvement of approximately 20.25% (61.5% vs 82%; n=81). The pre-recorded one-hour lecture found that students engaged with the material, on average, for 51.45 minutes, corresponding to an average of 91% video completion. Findings from this lecture intervention showed the pre- and post-assessment scores improved by an average of 5% (71% vs. 76%; n=80). A paired sample t-test identified a significant difference between the percent improvement between quizzes for SAT (M=19.71, SD=26.374) and percent improvement for recorded lecture (M=6.57, SD=26.369); [t(69)=3.450, p=0.001]. The use of SAT enhanced academic performance in midterm and final exams. The average performance in questions that mapped back to the flipped classroom utilizing SAT text was 91% (n=6) , as compared to an average performance of 73% to those questions that mapped back to the online pre-recorded lecture (n=11 ). Conclusions: Incorporating SATs into a flipped classroom model increased engagement and academic performance versus passive lectures when teaching medical physiology. Our study provides support to the use of social learning tools to enhance active learning in undergraduate medical education. none. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.

Shifting Reading into a Socially Constructed Activity: A Case Study on the Benefits and Challenges of Using

Perusall is a social annotation tool that engages students in digital course materials. The system facilitates student interaction via posts consisting of questions, responses, and comments on the video, written materials, and audio sources. This paper considers student perceptions of Perusall in an upper-year social science course (n=28). Students described Perusall as fun and engaging because they enjoyed positive communication with classmates, and the system was easy to use. Challenges of using the tool reflect the need for students to learn a new interface and technology glitches such as disappearing comments. We include suggestions for instructors wishing to use Perusall in this paper.

Personalizing Feedback and Developing Learner Agency Using Kami

This paper presents the schoolwide implementation and evaluation of an online social annotation tool (SA), Kami, used to provide personalized feedback to deepen learning and develop learner agency. Through a mixed-methods study, providing personalized video feedback using Kami could enhance learners' perceived individual learning, collaborative learning, learner agency, and deep learning. A strong correlation existed between learner agency and collaborative learning using Kami. Teachers' overall adoption rate and perceptions about using Kami provided evidence for the success of the implementation and professional development strategies based on the diffusion of innovation theory. The paper offers a glimpse of effective pedagogy using SA tools in a blended learning environment, strategies for technology professional development for large-scale implementation, and an evidence-based approach to evaluating an implementation outcome

Online Social Annotation

This research aimed to gain an understanding of how social annotations can be used to facilitate students' pre-class learning in a postgraduate unit at an Australian university. We analysed both survey data and system logs to examine students’ participation, performance, and experience when engaging in social annotations. The results show that online offshore students had a better overall unit result when considering their WAM before starting the unit. Furthermore, students had positive experiences with the social annotation activities. The students have identified several key benefits of engaging in social annotation and the associated challenges, providing valuable information for future course design. In summary, this investigation reveals the value of social annotation tools to facilitate student pre-class learning in both online and face-to-face classes.

Evaluating a social annotation tool for engagement and learning with preservice special education teachers

PurposeEmpirical validation of educational technology is critical for best practice, particularly when courses are delivered online. This study aims to investigate the predictive relationship of usage behaviors on perceptions of 30 preservice special education teachers while reading in an online social annotation reading tool.Design/methodology/approachIn this single-group quasi-experimental study, participants completed two readings in Perusall, once individually and once in small groups, then took a researcher-created survey after each reading. Descriptive data and paired sample t-tests were calculated. Predictive relationships between usage behaviors and survey results were analyzed with linear regression models.FindingsParticipants thought Perusall was useful for their learning and easier to use in small groups and that guided reading prompts were helpful. Usage behaviors did not significantly account for participant beliefs about Perusall. Instructors may wish to use guided reading prompts and small groups to maximize student learning and engagement.Originality/valueThis study addresses gaps in the literature (Suhre et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2023) by following one group of students over two semesters, using a commercially available tool, measuring actual usage behaviors and not solely student perceptions and analyzing instructor perceptions of the tool. The authors contribute further evidence that group-constructed knowledge is valuable for undergraduate learning (Kalir et al., 2020b). The authors also provide data-based suggestions for the use of social annotation tools that maximize student learning and engagement.

Empowering active learning: A social annotation tool for improving student engagement

AbstractThis study investigates the impact of Perusall, a social annotation tool, on an online postgraduate course conducted over two semesters at an Australian university. We examine the connection between students' pre‐class engagement and learning outcomes, utilizing both secondary data from Perusall platform and primary data through a survey. The findings indicate that pre‐class social annotations have a positive impact on students' performance on post‐class assessments. Notably, English as an Additional Language students with low English proficiency achieve comparable results in Perusall as those with high English proficiency. Additionally, the study identifies key aspects of social annotation that students highly value, providing insights for future implementation. Overall, this study highlights the potential of social annotation tools like Perusall to improve pre‐class engagement and enhance learning outcomes. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Student engagement with pre‐class activities is critical to their learning outcomes. The integration of social annotation tools for completing pre‐class reading has become progressively prevalent among teachers. The use of social annotation tools for reading and annotating has been found to have a positive influence on students' motivation, interactions, and academic performance. What this paper adds Online social annotation on lecture content has a short‐term positive impact on subsequent assessments, indicating that it is an effective way to engage students in pre‐class learning and improve their understanding and retention of course material. English as an Additional Language (EAL) students of varying levels of English proficiency achieve comparable results in social annotation assignments, highlighting the potential of this tool to provide an equitable learning experience for all students regardless of their language abilities. Social annotation activities promote a strong social presence with cohesive communication, positively impacting online learning's cognitive presence. This highlights the significance of collaborative learning and social interaction in online education, and the potential of social annotation tools to create an engaging and supportive learning environment. Students prefer receiving feedback from teachers within a Community of Inquiry (CoI) rather than through traditional modes of direct instruction or conversation initiation, highlighting the importance of teaching presence in refining their cognitive and social presences, and ultimately enhancing the quality of their learning experience. Implications for practice and/or policy This study provides practical suggestions for designing pre‐class learning activities that build upon pre‐class lessons, helping teachers to optimize students' learning experiences and outcomes. It sheds light on using inclusive and collaborative assessments as an effective way to enhance engagement and performance of EAL students. To cultivate a productive CoI within online educational contexts, teachers need to prioritize personalized feedback to students.

Effects of an annotation‐supported Socratic questioning approach on students' argumentative writing performance and critical thinking skills in flipped language classrooms

AbstractBackgroundCritical thinking and argumentative writing are considered complex but essential skills for learners. However, few studies have examined how instructions can be designed to optimize the development of such skills simultaneously. Contextualized in flipped language classrooms, this study aimed to develop an instructional innovation for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners.ObjectivesThis study investigated the effects of an annotation‐supported Socratic questioning (ASSQ) approach as a flipped classroom enhancement on students' argumentative writing and critical thinking in an EFL writing course.MethodsFifty students from two classes participated in the study, and they were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a comparison group. Following an 8‐week flipped learning curriculum, the experimental group learned with the proposed ASSQ approach in the enhanced flipped classroom, while the comparison group was exposed to the traditional flipped classroom. Students' argumentative writing performance was evaluated with their argumentative essays using a researcher‐developed writing rubric, and their critical thinking skills were assessed using the California Critical Thinking Skills Test.ResultsBoth groups significantly improved their argumentative writing, and the experimental group also significantly outperformed the comparison group after learning through the proposed approach. While the two groups had no significant difference in critical thinking skills, the within‐group comparison results revealed that the experimental group made significant improvements due to the instructional intervention.ImplicationsThe ASSQ approach could enhance the flipped classroom in regard to the teaching of argumentative writing, whereas it bears only limited impact on critical thinking. Overall, the positive effect of the proposed approach on enhancing English learners' argumentative writing performance was mainly attributed to the combined affordances of Socratic questioning and a social annotation tool to scaffold the students' thinking through verbal articulation, and to visualize their thinking with social annotations throughout the flipped learning process.

Collaborative reading for writing: an innovative task in academic settings

Reading for writing tasks have been widely implemented in past decades, but research is still scarce on computer-mediated reading for writing. With a growing interest in collaborative writing and collaborative reading, spurred on by the broader awareness of sociocultural theory and the collaborative nature of digital technologies, we proposed an innovative task collaborative reading for writing (CRW) and implemented it with graduate students of diverse L1s in the U.S. The students jointly read and annotated journal articles via the social annotation tool Perusall and then co-constructed OASIS summaries based on the reading. This study examines how the students employ comprehension strategies during collaborative reading/annotating; how they develop genre knowledge and attend to form during collaborative writing; and how they perceive CRW tasks. Data collected included the Perusall annotations, recorded pair talk, and reflection papers. Results showed that online CRW positively impacted learning by engaging learners in collectively expanding their reading strategies and enhancing genre knowledge and attention to form. CRW afforded mutual scaffolding and reading for a purpose. We posit that CRW tasks can have immense potential in diverse academic learning contexts where L2 writers are present. Future research is desired to examine the long-term effects of CRW on the development of L2 literacy skills and explore the potential of CRW tasks among different learner populations in other educational settings.

Literacy’s Schrödinger’s cat: capturing reading comprehension with social annotation

ABSTRACT As an internal process, documenting reading comprehension has remained challenging. This paper presents three case studies that explore the transactional practices of literacy education graduate students as they read and annotate assigned texts in an online, asynchronous class. Social annotation tools give multiple students simultaneous access to the same text and allow them to interact with one another, which positions literacy as a social practice. Findings illuminate the different approaches participants engaged in to interact with the text and their peers, with regard to comprehension strategies, critique, and community interaction. Implications offer insight for teacher educators on assessing teacher reading comprehension through social annotation.

Unfolding knowledge co-construction processes through social annotation and online collaborative writing with text mining techniques

Despite the positive claims on the pedagogical use of social annotation and online collaborative writing tools discussed in the literature, most of the findings are derived from interviews or self-reported survey data. Very few studies probed deep into the learning processes and examined students’ digital traces and the artefacts they co-construct. In this study, we employed semantic network analysis techniques to examine how the use of a social annotation tool (Diigo) coupled with an online collaborative writing (Google Docs) affects students’ learning outcomes. The results indicate that the use of Diigo coupled with Google Docs helps enhance student engagement in the collaborative process and that the concept connectivity and quality of the text co-constructed by each group using Diigo coupled with Google Docs is significantly higher than those using Moodle’s forum. In addition, the level of collaboration within a group correlates positively with the number of vertices with high lexical relevancy identified in the semantic network of the text co-constructed by each group.
 Implications for practice and policy:
 
 Undergraduate students can use Diigo coupled with Google Docs to enhance their collaborative work.
 Course leaders could use Diigo coupled with Google Docs to support learning activities, such as flipped learning or collaborative inquiry learning, in which students are required to engage in close reading and the co-construction of artefacts.
 Course instructors could consider using semantic measures such as the number of clusters and betweenness centrality to assess the quality of students’ co-constructed artefacts.

Using an Online Social Annotation Tool in a Content-Based Instruction (CBI) Classroom

Using an Online Social Annotation Tool in a Content-Based Instruction (CBI) Classroom

Using an Online Social Annotation Tool in a Content-Based Instruction (CBI) Classroom

Using an Online Social Annotation Tool in a Content-Based Instruction (CBI) Classroom

Retracted: Examining students' learning, perceived learning and motivation in social annotation‐based translation activities

AbstractThis study was conducted to examine how a collaborative social annotation tool can be used to support collaborative learning in translation instruction for EFL students. Participants were 100 undergraduate students who were English majors in a southeast university in China. An experiment with crossover design was carried out to examine the participants' learning and motivation in the social annotation‐supported condition and the traditional instruction condition. The results showed that students received higher scores on their translation work and rated their perceived learning higher when they completed the translation assignments in the social annotation‐support condition than in the traditional instruction condition. In addition, participants reported that they were more motivated when they completed the translation assignments in the social annotation‐supported condition, though participants with different levels of language proficiency might be motivated by different reasons.

The role of social annotation in facilitating collaborative inquiry-based learning

This study examines whether a social annotation (SoAn) tool may help facilitate students' collaborative inquiry-based learning (CIL). This kind of SoAn tool enables students to bookmark, highlight, annotate, share, discuss, and collaborate on information sources collected for their collaborative inquiry-based learning assignments (CILA) online. An analysis of these interactions may help instructors understand how students learn and may provide useful advice to them during the learning processes. This study invited 377 freshmen or sophomores from three different general education courses at a Hong Kong university to try out a self-developed SoAn tool, the Web Annotation and Sharing Platform (WASP). Quantitative data were collected from a questionnaire survey, activity log files, and CILA marks, while qualitative data were collected from individual interviews. The survey revealed that WASP facilitated the early stages of students' CIL in identifying inquiry questions and searching information. Students agreed that the SoAn tool is useful and effective in facilitating their CIL, but there were no significant changes in their CILA marks. This study revealed that no correlation was found among students' perception of the CIL/SoAn tool, the usage of the SoAn tool, and their CILA marks. With students' high perceived usefulness and effectiveness of SoAn tools, further studies should focus on how to better utilise SoAn tools in students' CIL.

Examining student learning and perceptions in social annotation-based translation activities

ABSTRACTLimited research has been conducted on how to incorporate computer-supported collaborative learning into translation instruction despite the potential benefits. A study was conducted with a group of college English majors in China to examine the effects of using a social annotation tool to encourage student interaction during translation activities. The results showed that students made greater improvement when they completed the translation assignments with the support of a social annotation tool than when they completed the assignments in the traditional way. In addition, students had a positive attitude toward the use of the social annotation tool.

Social annotation tools in higher education: a preliminary systematic review

This review discusses the evidences in using SA tools in higher education settings. Using a detailed inclusion/exclusion procedure, 71 studies were included. A large number of studies were centred on system design issues and the evaluation of designed tools within education and computer technology classes, with blended learning modality among undergraduates. Findings suggested there was a gradual increase in the frequency of SA-based publications, with Science Direct, Taylor & Francis, and IEEE as the three databases with the most SA publication experiences. Findings were mostly derived from quasi-experiments. Of the four major topics recognised, 'system design and implementation issues' was categorised as the first topic, followed by 'the effectiveness of SA tools on process-oriented measures', 'the effectiveness of SA tools on outcome-oriented measures', and 'the improvement of SA tools and learning design'. Process-oriented and outcome-oriented measures dominating the studies were quantity and quality of annotations and reading performance, respectively.

Comparing the use of a social annotation tool and a threaded discussion forum to support online discussions

This study aimed to understand how a threaded forum and asocial annotation tool, Diigo, supported online discussions. Forty-five pre-service teachers in two sections of an undergraduate course participated in two online discussion activities. A crossover study was conducted to examine student participation and interaction, and students' perceived learning experience in the two environments. In the first activity, students in Section A used Diigo for the online discussion while students in Section B used a threaded discussion forum. In the second activity, the two sections switched their online discussion environments. A participatory survey was administered at the end of the study. Postings in the two activities were analyzed and compared in terms of participation, focus, and interaction types. The results indicated that the different design of the two activities and the different functions of two environments impacted student participation, knowledge construction processes, and the foci of discussions. Social annotation tools could be used as an alternative environment to encourage certain types of interaction during online discussions.

Examining Student Participation in Three Learning Activities Supported by Social Annotation Tools

ocial annotation (SA) allows learners to highlight and comment on Web pages and share annotations with each other online. Despite its potential in promoting collaborative learning, examining how to integrate it into educational settings has not been fully studied. The purpose of the study is to examine student participation in three different SA-based online activities: (1) peer review, (2) annotated discussion, and (3) collaborative reading. Students participated in all three SA-based activities and took a survey at the end reporting the effectiveness of these activities. The analysis of students’ annotations and their survey responses suggested that although participants perceived the use of SA tools in all the three activities to be relatively effective, their levels of participation in the three activities varied greatly. The authors discuss the pros and cons of using SA in each of the activities based on the findings. Suggestions for future use and development of SA tools are also provided.

A case study of using a social annotation tool to support collaboratively learning

The purpose of the study was to understand student interaction and learning supported by a collaboratively social annotation tool — Diigo. The researcher examined through a case study how students participated and interacted when learning an online text with the social annotation tool — Diigo, and how they perceived their experience. The findings suggested that students participated actively in the collaborative learning activity and were engaged in a variety of behaviors including self-reflection, elaboration, internalization, and showing support. Although students generally had a moderately positive attitude toward using the social annotation tool for collaborative learning, a few problems were identified. In particular, students found it distracting to navigate through a large amount of annotation while reading the text. The study has implications for future research on using or developing social annotation tools for educational purposes.