THE IMPACT OF USING A COMPUTER - BASED SYSTEM FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ON READING TESTS PERFORMANCE

Although reading is a pervasive activity that higher education students must perform, their reading comprehension of texts is, on average, poor. At the same time, the strategies use by students work well for knowledge reproduction but not for deliver a good performance in higher education settings [1]. In this context, instructors can play a fundamental role by providing students a set of strategies and activities to improve their reading comprehension skills [2]. One strategy used by instructors to improve reading comprehension is the identification of key ideas in a text, together with the discussion and justification of them, carried out collaboratively by a small group of students. It is expected that, given an educational detonating factor associated with the reading of a text and the use of key ideas as a strategy to support reading comprehension, students generate better levels of comprehension and, therefore, better levels of learning around the educational detonating factor [3]. In this study, we used a computer-based system (RedCoApp) to facilitate the identification, discussion and justification of key ideas in a collaborative way with the purpose to improve student academic performance on reading texts. Specifically, the goal of our study was to test the possible positive effect that justification of key ideas previously identified by students in a text can have on their reading comprehension. To assess the hypothesis that the justification of key ideas improves student reading comprehension, an experimental design was conducted. The results suggest that the justification of key ideas not only doesn't improve reading comprehension but diminishes it. The evidence supported by our experiment was highly unexpected so more studies are needed to address its apparent contradiction with previous research.