note taking with gym2learn: helping students use ...

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Oct 26, 2006 - Note Taking, Text Comprehension, Metacognitive Strategies, Web-Learning. 1. ... This paper focuses on note-taking behaviour: in particular, ...
ISBN: 978-972-8924-48-5 © 2007 IADIS

NOTE TAKING WITH GYM2LEARN: HELPING STUDENTS USE ONLINE TEXT COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES Gianluca Merlo, Luciano Seta, Simona Ottaviano, Antonella Chifari, Giuseppe Chiazzese, Mario Allegra, Giovanni Todaro Institute for Educational Technologies- Italian National Research Council of Palermo (Italy)

ABSTRACT This paper presents a new web annotation tool and highlights some of the innovative features which make this tool different from other annotation systems. In particular, the tool is based on a metacognitive approach and aims to help students understand the self-regulatory processes necessary for increasing their awareness of the cognitive strategies to apply during web annotation. Using this tool the students can improve their cognitive skills and learn how to control and monitor the annotation process. This paper is focused on both the methodological aspects underlying the design of the system and the technological architecture used to set it up. KEYWORDS Note Taking, Text Comprehension, Metacognitive Strategies, Web-Learning.

1. INTRODUCTION Web-based learning is a practice that students frequently use, even though it is more difficult to manipulate contents when studying on the Internet than it is when using traditional educational resources. In order to overcome these limitations, over the last few years many researchers (Zeileger et al, 1999; Aleven et al, 2002; Chiazzese et al, 2004; MacAllister et al, 2005; Winne et al, 2006; Lee et al, 2006) have been investigating the possibility of extending the functionalities of common browsers in order to provide students with simple and effective study tools. However, some of the tools which have been developed fail to stimulate awareness in the use of the reading, comprehension and memorizing strategies needed to maximize effective study. These systems provide students with important functionalities for managing their learning activities, like conceptual maps, highlighting tools, keywords, association of comments and notes to a text, but they assume that understanding the connection between the use of the tools and the underlying cognitive strategies is implicit or automatic. In a previous work is remarked that students may run into difficulties, especially when they are not metacognitively aware of their learning processes (Allegra et al, 2003): in fact, their learning could be compromised as a result of their difficulty in understanding the contents studied. In view of these considerations, a technological solution is proposed; in this system the functionalities are implemented as a result of a different methodological perspective. Gym2Learn aims to support students during online learning in the acquisition of a series of comprehension strategies for which they are trained in an initial phase (Chiazzese et al, 2007). This paper focuses on note-taking behaviour: in particular, it describes the specific technological aspects of the functionalities and the specific meaning attributed to the concept of the word note. According to the De Mauro Italian online dictionary, a note is an: «annotation added to a text to explain a passage or express an opinion». More precisely, according to Slotte and Loka (2003) and Azouaou et al (2004), the term note concerns both the process of note-taking and the activity which gives rise to the note (product). This distinction is very

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IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2007)

important because most web based note-taking tools focus only on the second aspect of an annotation, whereas Gym2learn supports both aspects of the concept. In this sense, the solution adopted in Gym2Learn is different from most other existing environments with respect to the following aspects: in this tool, the note does not correspond to the traditional behaviour of collecting and classifying contents into a predefined typology, as happens for example in systems like Marginalia, Gibeo, VPEN (Xin et al, 2005; Miller, 2004; Hwang et al, 2005), but rather corresponds to the behaviour of activating a cognitive strategy for text comprehension that becomes visible and can be recalled from the note. Consequently, it’s possible to affirm that the note inserted by a student who uses Gym2Learn is at the same time both the process and product of the application of a cognitive strategy. The notes are represented on the web page by icons, which differ according to the type of strategy used. These icons act as a tool for recovering the notes when rereading the text and for monitoring the application of a strategy. Moreover, these notes are organized in a chronological order that indicates the type of strategy used and the time sequence of each insertion. Students are thus able to constantly monitor the annotation activity regarding the use of each cognitive strategy. However, since the activity of note insertion and monitoring may lead nowhere if it does not help the student to keep a personal record of his online activity and may therefore be seen as a fairly useless activity, it could be useful to extend the classic concept of note taking by enabling students to revise their inserted notes. This means that the student can re-elaborate the most significant items he has annotated to create his own personalized work. A student who uses Gym2Learn can select the notes that he thinks are most significant and produce a synthesis document . This final phase is comparable to the traditional concept of note taking, which involves the skills of abstraction, categorization, synthesis, etc (Fundarò, 2001). In fact, the synthesis document gives the student the opportunity to re-elaborate his notes, paraphrasing, linking and reorganizing the concepts that he considers most important for achieving his didactic aim. The following paragraphs describes in detail the technological solutions adopted to give students practice in using strategies for comprehension of an online text and meta-comprehension strategies for checking and assessing their level of comprehension.

2. THE ANNOTATION MODEL IN GYM2LEARN Gym2Learn supports the student in practicing online text comprehension strategies through a web annotation system. It offers an environment where the student is first introduced to the strategies and then given practice in using and controlling them during the text comprehension of web documents. The interface uses two services: XPointer and Annotation Service, one for identifying the part of the document to annotate and the other to handle the communication with the server for the management of the metadata related to the annotations. As shown in Figure 1, the system provides a pop-up menu to access the features for creating the notes and a sidebar to allow the student to view all annotations, review notes and modify or delete them, produce a short document with the notes selected. This document could be reelaborated afterwards. The annotations are modelled as a class of metadata. For the implementation of this architecture the system adopts Annotea and extends the RDF schema (RDF, 2004) with the introduction of a specific namespace characterized by 4 types of annotation corresponding to the following comprehension strategies: • previous knowledge; • formulating hypotheses and verifying them during surfing; • asking oneself questions and answering them to verify comprehension; • identifying important parts of the text; Each cognitive strategy is a type of annotation modeled according to an RDF schema (Kahan et al, 2002) in order to store properties about the strategy. This connection between comprehension strategy and type of annotation is implemented by extending the RDF schema with the metadata related to the properties of each comprehension strategy. In this way the action of creating an annotation corresponds to a specific comprehension strategy exercise that the student actives selecting some texts on the document and using the pop-up menu for triggering the specific function.

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The following example shows the details of an annotation “Identifying important part of the text”. This strategy provides the student with a set of advance organizers (who, what, how, when, where, why, which etc) useful in identifying and organizing the important part of the text according to the selected organizer. In other words, the student selects the important part of the text and links it to the related organizer. Figure 1 shows the Gym2Learn architecture, designed as an extension of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Figure 1. Gym2Learn’s architecture

Part of the RDF file is shown below. In particular, there is a fragment of information related to the “important parts of the text” strategy associated to the annotation type according to the RDF file. The following line specifies the type of strategy used by the student (Identify the important parts of the text) and unequivocally identifies the use of the strategy.