A Collaborative Reading Annotation System with Gamification Mechanisms to Improve Reading Performance

Collaborative annotation tools have been adopted to facilitate reading comprehension. The more the students make annotations, the better they can achieve in learning. However, students might decrease their willingness of providing annotations when they can easily read peers' annotations. To encourage students to contribute annotations in collaborative digital reading, this study employed gamification design in the developed Collaborative Reading Annotation System (CRAS) and investigated its effects on promoting students' annotation behaviors, reading comprehension, and immersion experience. Participants were 55 students from two classes of an elementary school in Northeastern Taiwan. A quasi-experimental research design was adopted. One class was assigned as the experimental group that utilized gamified CRAS and another class was assigned as the control group that used CRAS without gamification mechanisms. The results showed that students in the experimental group made significant more annotations across almost all types of annotations and had significant higher degree of engagement of using CRAS than the students in the control group. In this study, the differences of the reading performance between the two groups were not found. Future study is needed to modify the gamification mechanisms to promote both reading engagement and reading achievement.