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The design of interactions among peers plays a key role in collaborative learning. Various strategies have been applied to assist learners in collaborating and creating a continuous effort to construct and maintain shared knowledge, such as utilizing a concept map as a representational tool during discourse. Some previous studies have revealed its positive effect on both the learning achievements and the attitudes of the students. A strategy for improving the quality of explanation of the students during collaborative concept mapping is to enable them to externalize their thinking in their private spaces beforehand. However, students may face difficulties when they need to integrate their individual propositions with the group concept map. This study employs the reciprocal kit-build (RKB) approach to help students externalize their ideas, understand and clarify their partners' perspectives, integrating with their comprehension, hoping they can construct a high-quality collaborative product. The study is conducted in a linear algebra class in an Indonesian university. The effect of the RKB as learning activities on the group outcomes is evaluated. How students change their propositions, from the individual to the collaborative phase, following the visualization of the difference map provided by the RKB system is also presented. Perceptions of the students during these activities are examined to measure the effectiveness of the approach from the viewpoints of the participants. The findings convey that the RKB is promising for learning in a collaborative context despite some limitations in the practical classroom experimental settings.

Collaborative learning requires a structured and open environment where individuals can actively exchange and elaborate their ideas to achieve a high-quality problem-solving solution. The use of concept map has been extensively implemented to facilitate idea generation and maintain shared focus during discussion. This study employs the Reciprocal Kit-Build (RKB) approach as a designed activity to support collaborative concept mapping. Though previous studies show the RKB is promising to promote productive discussion and achieve high-quality group products, they have not investigated how individual knowledge differences may potentially influence the effectiveness of collaboration. This study aims to identify the effect of group composition on learning effectiveness at the level of interaction between individual and group and at the level of the group as a whole. At the interaction level, we investigate the amount of knowledge transfer from shared and unshared individual knowledge to group solutions, while at the group level, the quality of collaborative maps is evaluated. Moreover, we explore the affective responses of learners during designated activities. A single group design is applied to illustrate the learning activities in a practical classroom settings where all students receive the same treatment. Our findings show that the transfer of individual shared and unshared knowledge is considerably high in all group conditions. Group composition does not significantly affect knowledge transfer and final group-outcome products; however, it may induce learners to experience different affective states. The results are essential for practitioners who intend to apply the RKB in their classroom to determine the appropriate group settings.

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Concept mapping is one of the instructional strategies implemented in collaborative learning to support discourse and learning. While prior studies have established its positive significance on the learning achievements and attitudes of students, they have also discovered that it can lead to students conducting less discussion on conceptual knowledge compared to procedural and team coordination. For instance, some inaccurate ideas are never challenged and can become ingrained. Designing a learning environment where individual knowledge is acknowledged and developed constructively is necessary to achieve similarity of individual knowledge after collaboration. This study applies the Reciprocal Kit Build (RKB) approach before collaborative concept mapping. The approach consists of three main phases: (1) individual map construction; (2) re-constructional map building; and (3) difference map discussion. Finally, each team will build a group map. Previous studies have shown that the visualization of similarities and differences during the third phase correlates with the improvement of concept map quality. The current paper presents our investigation on the effects of the first and second phases in terms of the final group products. We analyze the correlations between the similarity of individual knowledge represented in the first-phase maps, the comprehension of partner's representation during the second phase, and the changes of map scores. Our findings indicate that comprehension level is a stronger predictor than the similarity of individual knowledge for estimating score gain. The ways in which patterns of knowledge transfer from individual to group maps, which exhibit how the group products are built based on individual inputs, are also discussed. We illustrate that the number of shared and unshared links in the group solutions are proportionally distributed, and that the number of reconstructed links dominates the group solutions, rather than the non-reconstructed ones.

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