“I Felt Their Engagement Through Their Eyes”: Advancing College Students’ Social Reading Through Knowledge Synthesis (Poster 38)

• In Event: Saturday Poster Session 1:15 pm
  In Poster Session: Advanced Technologies for Learning SIG Poster Session

Abstract

The study presents The Synthesis Lab, an innovative technological tool, designed to enhance social reading in higher education through knowledge synthesis. The tool provides a structural framework that guides students through key steps of synthesis making within collaborative learning contexts. The paper reports the implementation of the design in a graduate classroom, indicating that the synthesis process enhanced students’ engagement in social reading. Moreover, while students effectively connected peers’ ideas, they tended to focus more on information organization than deep analysis and novel knowledge creation. Despite this, The Synthesis Lab proved beneficial in supporting knowledge synthesis in various ways. The research highlights the importance of integrating such tools in collaborative learning designs and highlights the need for additional scaffoldings.

Authors

• Xinran Zhu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Pingting Chen, University of Pennsylvania

• Bodong Chen, University of Pennsylvania

• Hong Shui, Sichuan Normal University