Investigating the impact of Collaborative Annotation on Student Quality of Learning in Higher Education

Abstract

Collaborative Annotation is ‘a literacy strategy that engages students in critical reading, critical thinking, writing and collaboration all in one activity’ (Schwane, 2015). This study reports on the effect and role that a Collaborative Annotation tool we developed plays in the assessment of students’ understanding of their course material and recommends the best pedagogical approaches and research possibilities that can further improve its impact on traditional learning contexts in the future. Our preliminary investigations suggest that there is a positive correlation of Collaborative Annotation using our tool with student quality of learning. This is promising as it is broadly in line with published research and indicates that our research merits further investigation on extending our pipelines to incorporate AI peers and assess how they impact students’ learning.