Exploring college students’ participatory patterns, cognitive engagements and searching performance during online collective information searching (CIS) activity

• Main Authors: Chia-Ching Lin, 林佳慶
• Other Authors: Chin-Chung Tsai
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/68777112669361186681

博士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 工程技術研究所 === 99 === This study was to investigate the associations among college students’ participatory behaviors, epistemological beliefs, cognitive engagements and searching performance during online collective information searching (CIS) activity. Collective information searching activity represents how users utilize social bookmarking service to exploit the Internet in a collective manner. A group of 101 college students participated in the research procedure, and performed the CIS activity to glean quality online resources for the given searching assignments. Based on different supportive mechanisms, the procedure of the CIS activity was conducted through private stage (focusing on individual work) and public stage (focusing on collective work) in sequence. At both stages, students’ participatory behaviors, cognitive engagement and information searching performance were explored by analyzing log data of bookmark collection, annotation and comment. In addition, students’ epistemological beliefs were assessed by a quantitative instrument for understanding its relations to the CIS activity. Through comparisons of cognitive engagement and searching performance between private and public stages of the CIS activity, the findings indicated that the students exercised more frequent and advanced cognitive engagements, as well as attained better searching performance of the assignments at public stage than at private stage. Furthermore, the students exhibited different participatory behaviors, levels of cognitive engagements and searching performance when coping with different assignments at different stages. The findings also signified significant associations among epistemological beliefs, participatory behaviors and cognitive engagements at different stages of the CIS activity. In addition, through cluster analysis of quantitative indicators regarding students’ personal contributions to the CIS activities, at public stage various participatory patterns exhibited by the college students were identified as “hitchhiker,” “individualist,” “active” and “critic” representing one’s investment in exploiting the social bookmarking application to undertake the CIS activity. The findings revealed that the students with more “active” participation in the CIS activity received more peer feedbacks, exhibited higher levels of cognitive engagements and attained better collective searching performance. The results of stepwise regression analysis further indicated the role of epistemological beliefs, participatory behaviors and cognitive engagements on searching performance of the given assignments at different stages of the CIS activity. Based on the major findings of this study, it could be suggested that participation in the CIS activity is helpful to the practice of cognitive engagements and the collection of quality online resources for learning with the Internet. Further implications of the CIS activity for educational purposes were discussed.