SQAR: An annotation-based study process to enhance the learner's personal learning

Abstract

Annotating pedagogical documents is a common habit among learners, thus, considering learners' annotation activity in education system and especially in technology enhanced learning can have many benefits for learners. However, the annotation practice by oneself is not sufficient in helping a learner to work and better understand his pedagogic documents. So we propose, in this paper, an annotation-based pedagogical process called SQAR (Survey, Question, Annotation and Review) which aims to help the learner to enhance his learning activity and to make sure his learning evolution in both knowledge and ability. We use the annotation activity, within the context of our proposed SQAR process, to enhance the learner's learning efficiency. The SQAR process is implemented into WebAnnot, a web-based annotation tool. This is because learners use increasingly web-based pedagogical documents that they annotate with their personal annotations. The evaluation experiment with undergraduate students shows that the annotation-based learning process SQAR, compared to other learning methods, provides an important guidance for the improvement of learners understanding and memorization of concepts and ideas, when they study their pedagogical documents.