A Study on Using Online Tagging and Concept Map to Foster Students' Group Cognition

With the development of information technology, online collaborative learning has become a powerful supplement to traditional teaching methods. This study tries to explore whether the application of online collaborative reading with tagging and concept map can improve students' group cognition. In this study, 24 postgraduate students from a university in Shanghai were invited to participate in the course of 'professional English' and three collaborative reading activities are designed First, students were divided into eight groups and use Kami to conduct collaborative reading and online tagging, while a list of keywords for each article is provided in advance by teachers to support student's understanding. Then each group was required to draw an online concept map collaboratively. The results show that most of students were highly satisfied with the functions provided in Kami to support their online collaboration reading. By comparing the tags and concept maps, this study also found that with the deepening of collaboration, students had deeper communication and understanding of the keywords without the list. The use of tagging and concept map not only promote the collaboration, but also can be used to assess students' group cognition, which provides ideas for designing collaborative reading tasks in future.