This study investigated the influence of reading time while building a closed concept map on reading comprehension and retention. It also investigated the effect of having access to the text during closed concept map creation on reading comprehension and retention. Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N =101) read a text, took an after-text test, and took part in one of three conditions, “Map & Text”, “Map only”, and “Double Text”, took an after-activity test, followed by a two-week retention period and then one final delayed test. Analysis revealed that higher reading times were associated with better reading comprehension and better retention. Furthermore, when comparing “Map & Text” to the “Map only” condition, short-term reading comprehension was improved, but long-term retention was not improved. This suggests that having access to the text while building closed concept maps can improve reading comprehension, but long term learning can only be improved if students invest time accessing both the map and the text.

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.