Findings When Converting a Summative Evaluation Instrument to a Formative One Through Collaborative Learning Activities

Although illiteracy has been in constant decline over the last decades, there are too many reports about people having problems to identify the main ideas contained in texts they read. Reading comprehension is essential for students, because it is a predictor of their academic or professional success. Researchers have developed computer supported learning activities for supporting students develop their reading comprehension skills with varying degrees of success. One of the various advantages of having students work on electronic documents is that computers can help teachers monitor students’ work. One of the problems of these systems is poor usability due to sophisticated human-computer interaction paradigms emulating activities students perform in traditional learning activities for improving reading comprehension with pen and paper. In this paper we report on a research which implements a learning activity based on answers with multiple choice similar to a questionnaire, which is easy to implement in computers and easy to interact with. Although multiple choice questionnaires are associated to summative evaluations, the implemented learning activity uses them within a collaborative learning activity in which students have to justify, first individually then collaboratively, their choice with a short text. The developed system was used and evaluated in a real learning situation; one of the most interesting findings is not only that students who have to justify their option with a text perform better than those who have not, but that the pertinence of the text to the question does not play a major role. This suggests that just asking the students to justify their answers requires them to do a thinking process which otherwise they would not do.