Effects of group awareness tools on students' engagement, performance, and perceptions in online collaborative writing: Intergroup information matters

Low student engagement is still a problem in online collaborative writing. We integrated two types of awareness information (i.e., intergroup and intragroup information) into a collaborative writing platform to enhance student engagement. A quasi-experiment study was conducted to examine the effects of intergroup and intragroup awareness information. The experimental class of 81 students were presented with intergroup information while the control class of 80 students were presented with intragroup information, and these students were required to perform collaborative writing and peer evaluation activities. The Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney U test revealed that the experimental class had significantly higher behavioral engagement in writing and better academic performance than the control class. Also, the results showed that the students with intergroup awareness information had deeper cognitive thinking and demonstrated more positive emotion than the students with intragroup awareness information in online discussion and peer evaluation. Additionally, this study investigated students' perceptions of the group awareness tool using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). This paper concludes with future research directions for supporting collaborative learning.