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Tagclouds and group cognition: Effect of tagging support on students' reflective learning in team blogs
Author(s) -
Xie Ying,
Lin ShuYuan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
british journal of educational technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.79
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-8535
pISSN - 0007-1013
DOI - 10.1111/bjet.12293
Subject(s) - cognition , psychology , task (project management) , metacognition , group (periodic table) , need for cognition , reflection (computer programming) , mathematics education , computer science , chemistry , management , organic chemistry , neuroscience , economics , programming language
We investigated the effects of supported tagging (a prompting mechanism for students to stop and think about their writing) for team blogging on undergraduate students' reflective learning and the relationship between tagclouds and group cognition. Thirty‐nine students were randomly assigned to six groups and blogged for 5 weeks. Three groups were randomly selected to receive instructor‐provided keywords as supports for their tagging activity in the team blogs. Data analyses included: (1) comparing student‐attached tags to the instructor‐provided keywords and each participant's concept map for evidence of reflection; and (2) comparing each team's tagcloud against the team members' aggregated concept maps for the corresponding relationship between tagclouds and group cognition. Results revealed that the instructor's support in such situations might be helpful to keep students on task whereas free tagging may offer an opportunity for students' deeper processing of learning. The results also showed that tagclouds well represented students' group cognition.