Evaluating the effectiveness of a collaborative framework on student learning

Students rely on search engines to increase their knowledge about a topic or to complete a given assignment. Online information retrieval consists of web sessions where students submit keyphrases as queries to search engines. In addition, search engines will surface Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) containing suggestions pertinent to the queried domain. Some studies show that to build effective queries, one should have some knowledge about the topic being searched, this might pose a challenge for newly enrolled students who are not familiar with the domain. This research aims to measure the effect on learning of a framework designed to lessen such challenges. The proposed framework includes four key tabs to enhance student search experience by providing relevant keyphrases. The Last Searched Keyphrases tab helps students navigate through their research history, offering easy access to previously searched terms. The Auto-Generated Keyphrases tab dynamically creates new keyphrases using a keyphrase extraction function based on HTML content and Part of Speech (POS) tagging. The Similar Keyphrases tab promotes collaboration by displaying keyphrases searched by peers, utilising algorithms like Euclidean distance, Cosine similarity, and Jaccard similarity to identify the most relevant matches. Lastly, the Similar Study Group Keyphrases tab presents predefined terminologies identified by lecturers to aid students in expanding their domain-specific vocabulary. An evaluation methodology involving students and techniques to aggregate results are discussed to determine if such a framework increases the student’s knowledge of a particular subject. The results obtained show that students using the proposed framework, performed better, their overall marks improved and the framework assisted students in solving theoretical and problem solving questions. In addition, the evaluation methodology can be adopted by other researchers to assess the effectiveness of their proposed frameworks or interventions in enhancing student learning outcomes in various domains.