“Tell me about the process”: exploring visual analytics to unveil collaboration and concept mapping processes

Final products of students’ collaborative work do not inform much about individual contributions and whether there are processes leading different groups to either high or low levels of achievement. A great advantage of using learning technologies is that traces of students’ collaborative processes can be automatically captured. This paper presents our first steps in extracting and visualising different aspects of the face-to-face collaboration processes to enhance teacher’s awareness, in the context of small groups of students building concept maps at an interactive tabletop. We propose an approach, mixing bottom-up and top-down approaches, to inform the design of visualisations that can provide insights to teachers about the collaboration during the task. It is based on a manual empirical analysis of the sub-processes and strategies followed by students whilst only using the electronically observable data.