Analysing Knowledge Generation and Acquisition from Individual and Face-to-face Collaborative Concept Mapping

Collaborative learning provides students the opportunity to externalise personal perspectives and compare their understanding of a subject matter area with their peers. Concept mapping is a tool that permits students to build visual representations of the relationships among concepts to form a meaningful artefact that models a domain of knowledge or gives an answer to a posed question. Emerging pervasive devices, such as interactive tabletops, offer new possibilities to support collocated collaboration and analyse the collaborative process as never before. The synergy between these three fields: collaborative learning, concept mapping and the use of interactive tabletops, offers the possibility to both analyse and support the process of collaborative knowledge building. We report a study of 60 students who created concept maps in the stages: individual pre-concept maps, group concept mapping and individual post-concept maps. We analysed similarity between these and whether individual students were affected by the group collaboration measured through an automatic model. We found that students who contributed most to the group map maintain their understanding in the post-map; while those who contribute least to the group map tend to change their individual perspective. We also found that after students build a concept map at the tabletop their level of agreement is significative higher. The main contributions of this paper are the approach to study individual and collaborative concept mapping; and the analysis of knowledge acquisition and collaboration by tracking the flow of use of propositions.