Student Versus Expert Outlines in Reading Comprehension: The Effect of Collaborative Construction

Reading comprehension is a basic skill that influences the outcomes of language learning. The role played by using different cognitive organizers and collaboration as well in the improvement of reading comprehension of academic texts has been a subject of recent literature. Hence, this study employed the experimental 2 × 2 factorial design to identify the difference in effect of two types of outlines, student-constructed versus expert-constructed, on EFL learners’ reading comprehension across two modes of learning, collaborative and individual. Participants were 161 English majors from a reading intact English course at a Saudi university. They were randomly assigned into four treatment groups, two student-constructed and two expert-constructed outlines groups. After ensuring a homogenous level of the four groups in reading comprehension, the groups had the reading comprehension test on one mode of application; collaborative student-constructed, collaborative expert-constructed, individual student-constructed, and individual expert-constructed outlines. The findings revealed that there was a significant main effect among the four groups in reading comprehension scores favoring the student-constructed outlines groups. Besides that, the findings indicated that the collaborative student-constructed outlining is the most effective mode. The implications are discussed in terms of the efficacy of student-construction of outlines in a collaborative context and recommend its significance in supporting EFL learners’ reading comprehension of academic texts.


Introduction
English language majors have to read extensively various English texts during their academic studies.This calls for identifying the most effective techniques and strategies that support their comprehension of the advanced structures, concepts, and concept relations within texts.Taraban et al. (2004) refer to the strategies that help readers to comprehend and remember what they read more as pragmatic reading strategies that include activities such as underlining important points, taking notes on the margins, and highlighting.Literature on reading comprehension identifies outlining as a technique of encoding process while reading academic texts in college courses, revealing that the use of an outline has positive correlations to improved reading comprehension (Lei et al., 2010;Ormrod, 2008;White, 2004).''Structurally, the use of an outline presents the visual organization of a textbook that function to prepare readers for identification of major topics and relevant information within the text'' (Lei et al., 2010, p. 38).Meanwhile, expressing the text with visual elements like cognitive and graphic organizers-like outlining-are effective post-reading or whole-reading process strategies (Collins & Cheek, 1999;Daly et al., 2015;Duke & Pearson, 2009).EFL learners are expected to read different English textbooks without much difficulty.Unfortunately, many of them still have great difficulty reading English textbooks.Reading comprehension manifests itself as a specific and important academic skill EFL students have been shown to struggle with (Droop & Verhoeven, 2003).It is an integral part of the reorganization and evaluation modes of comprehension necessary for academic success (Hill, 2011).
There is a growing research interest in using advanced and cognitive organizers to restructure long texts (Manoli & Papadopoulou, 2012;Redford et al., 2012).Outlining has been well recognized as an effective study skill (Mueller, 2003), and well established as an effective cognitive organizer in teaching (Hung & Van, 2018;Wahyudin, 2018).It is defined as an input-enhancement or a text aid that represents concepts, and their relations through spatial arrangements and multiple intra-and inter-concept relations keeping the semantic content without addition for the reader to view at a single glance (Amundsen et al., 2008).It helps students how to understand the structure of a given text by analyzing its organization, extracting clues, and identifying the main idea and its surrounding details (Mueller, 2003).Building on this significance and the assumption that using outlining is effective in reading comprehension improvement, some investigations are needed in the Saudi context to provide enough data to determine the viability of different types of outlining that may help Saudi English majors to comprehend long academic texts.This need is also emerged as a response to the empirically evidenced inadequacy of some English majors' reading comprehension in the Saudi context (Alenezi, 2021;Radzuwan & Qrqez, 2019;Shehzad et al., 2020).Therefore, this study was an attempt to have a close look at their reading comprehension skill and the possible contribution of using two modes of outlining (student-vs.expert-constructed) as cognitive organizers within two different learning modes (individual vs. collaborative).
To achieve this goal, this study employed the experimental 2 3 2 factorial design to investigate the differences in the efficacy of the four applications.Its results may guide English language teachers and course designers toward collaboration and studentsconstruction of cognitive organization of texts as pedagogically sound practices.The results also might draw attention to the significance of collaboration in reading comprehension classes and help to provide a more complete picture than earlier research by including different learning modes in EFL settings.
Accordingly, this paper reports the study in five parts as follows: the second part presents the literature review and the conceptual framework of the study; parts three and four report methods and results; and finally, parts five and six present the discussion and conclusion of the study.

Literature Review
Cognitive Organizers.Strategies that support reading comprehension are essential elements required for a meaningful understanding of written language input (Lin, 2010).Many studies have examined the benefits of cognitive organizers, comparing them to plain texts, as a follow-up strategy in learning from text.Some results indicate that students studying cognitive organizers learned more hierarchical and coordinated relations, and as a result, they were more successful in applying that knowledge and in writing integrated essays than students studying outlines or text alone (D. H. Robinson & Kiewra, 1995).So far, other cognitive organizers have been extensively researched as input enhancement techniques that help learners tackle complex reading challenges like concept maps (Nesbit & Adesope, 2006;Tzeng, 2010), graphic organizers (Pang, 2013;Praveen & Rajan, 2013;Rahim et al., 2017), advance organizers (Nemer & Kamal, 2018;Teng, 2022), and semantic maps (Ismael, 2021;Y. C. Pan, 2017).However, inconclusive literature was found to examine the significance of using outlines as a scaffold in reading comprehension as well as distinguishing among different types of outlines.Indeed, the large number of studies that focus on varying aspects of these COs' application to English language teaching requires particular comparative investigations to assist the adoption of the best working ones.
Outline as a Cognitive Organizer (CO) and Reading Comprehension.According to Manoli and Papadopoulou (2012), an outline is a reader-friendly and easy-toconstruct type of CO.Using outlining, as a cognitive organizer, was associated with improved reading comprehension for students with different abilities and levels (Bean et al., 1986;Griffin & Tulbert, 1995;Kim et al., 2004;Tan, 2015).It was approved to be favored as a strategy to ease off text comprehension problems (Jin et al., 2020;D. H. Robinson & Kiewra, 1995;D. H. Robinson et al., 1996) and holds great potential for helping readers clearly and efficiently see the unseen text phenomenon (Redford et al., 2012).It is considered a mapping tool that can be an important instrument for reading comprehension (Sinatra & Pizzo, 1992).
When examining the empirical studies and potential research areas into outlines' impact on learning and comprehension, it was experimentally tackled over the last four decades and very earlier results were found to assure the potential of outlines when used by the students (Barton, 1930;Bianco & McCormick, 1989;F. Robinson, 1961).Iovino (1993) found that they enabled them to double the gains realized by the other groups who received instruction on networking and other memory techniques on the test of comprehension and retention of expository text.Sanchez et al. (2001) found that the participants who were trained to construct a mental outline of the text's topic structure as they read and then use their mental outlines to guide their recall attempts remembered text topics and their organization was better than participants who read the text without headings.Arthaud and Goracke (2006) used an outline format as a scaffolding strategy to teach students to organize basic information from reading passages.Their results indicated that the regular use of outlining strategy throughout a whole year led to improved performance on class reading and final assessments of reading comprehension by both regular and special education learners.
While current literature provides evidence that outlines, as a type of CO, are favored over others, some findings are contradicted.D. H. Robinson and Molina (2002) found that graphic organizers are more effective than outlines in helping students learn concept relations in text.Similarly, Nesbit and Adesope (2006) found that concept maps are more effective in facilitating readers' recall of learned knowledge than lists or outlines.D. H. Robinson and Skinner (1996) found that those who used graphic organizers to search for information found the answer to a pattern question more quickly than those who searched either outlines or text.Even fewer studies have examined the effect of outlines as advance organizers and searched if the timing of outline intervention made any difference in students' comprehension (Glynn et al., 1985;Mannes & Kintsch, 1987;Tsubaki & Nakayama, 2004).Krug et al. (1989) used outlines to investigate the effect of form schemata on reading comprehension.Their results indicated that when students read outlines before the text, they can perform significantly better on the reordering task.This supports the claim that outlines may provide readers with knowledge of text organization.
Literature proposed that reading comprehension can be very related to outlining.Comprehension of a text's topic structure is an essential but demanding component of text processing for the reader (Sanchez et al., 2001).Some results revealed that students' performance in free recall and inference questions was better when reading high-coherence text compared to reading low-coherence text (Gilabert et al., 2005;Vidal-Abarca et al., 2000).According to Gurlitt and Renkl (2010), outlining may help identify coherence gaps in texts and rearrange sentences and may help learners to make the basic connections by themselves by establishing more ordered and explicit links between the arguments in the text.Bogaerds-Hazenberg et al. (2021) identify outlining in literature as a structure-based summarization technique that improves students' text comprehension. it might also facilitate text recall, functioning as a mnemonic aid (Taylor, 1982).
Expert-and Student-Constructed Outlines.Very limited literature was found to tackle the variation in students' performance depending on the types of outlines (Moradi et al., 2020).Meanwhile, ample literature has examined the efficiency of other expert and learner-generated cognitive organizers (Go¨rgen & Yildirim, 2013;Hall, 1990;Marefat & Ghahari, 2009;McCagg & Dansereau, 1991;Oliver, 2009;Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011;Saeedi et al., 2013).Chang et al. (2001) investigated the effectiveness of a construct-by-self concept map made by the learners themselves and found that the construct-on-scaffold concept mapping designed by the experts had a better learning impact on students than the construct-by-self.This finding is justified by the fact that learning the scaffold aid can reduce the workload and produce better learning effects.In another study, Chang et al. (2002) stated that using expert-generated maps helps learners by presenting the macrostructure of the text in the form of a graphic representation and could help save time and give a welldefined graphic organization that can serve as a preview of the reading material outline structure.Boyle and Weishaar (1997) enumerate the advantages of both types of outlines.They indicated that expertgenerated outlines have the ''merits of helping teachers to save student-training time, provide simplified presentations, containing pertinent ideas that can be used for further assessment and measurement and identify difficult content points before teaching.''On the other hand, they summed up the advantages of students-generated outlines for students in gaining a ''better understanding of the main points of the material and its relations, personalizing the outlines by using their terms, abbreviations, and symbols, constructing similar content in other classes, and getting more actively and autonomously' ' (p. 228).Results based on comparing the two modes of outline constructions are difficult to place within the recent literature.However, it is noted that there is good evidence for the benefits of students in creating their own outlines from text materials (Tan, 2015;Tuckman, 1993Tuckman, , 1998)).A limited amount of research has compared expert and students-constructed outlines.Therefore, this study aimed at comparing the effect of the two types in enhancing reading comprehension.
The Effect of Collaboration on Reading Comprehension.As indicated by Oczkus (2018), focusing on the social nature of learning improves and scaffolds reading comprehension.Cognitive organizers can be applied in different modes of learning.Based on the number of students involved in the outlining process, two ways can be used: individual outlining and collaborative outlining.In the individual outlining, every student constructs an outline indicating his understanding of concepts and their relation within a text.In collaborative outlining, groups of students collectively work and exchange their views and experiences to construct an outline.There are several experimental comparisons with variant results about the effectiveness of individual and collaborative reading.
Comparing two types of performance according to the number of students involved in generating cognitive organizers individually or collaboratively, ample results revealed a statistically equal performance of both cooperative and individual groups in the measurements of reading comprehension (Riahi & Pourdana, 2017;Saeedi et al., 2013) reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition (Shaaban, 2006), and reading comprehension test and self-efficacy (Kassem, 2013).In contrast, other studies revealed that learners in the collaborative learning mode outperformed the individual learning on comprehension and recall of main ideas (Osa-Melero, 2012), reading comprehension and motivation (C.Y. Pan & Wu, 2013), reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary (Teng & Reynolds, 2019), and reading comprehension (Aghazadeh et al., 2019).
The above review of the existing literature found that there are two gaps related to the efficacy of expert versus students-constructed outlines within different learning conditions and the need for more convincing evidence of the superiority of collaborative reading.To bridge these gaps, the present study investigates the contributions of expert-constructed outlines and student-constructed outlines within two different modes of learning, namely collaborative and individual learning.
Purpose and Questions.The current study was guided by two specific motivations.First, reading comprehension is one of the fundamental required skills among English majors since their academic study necessitates reading expository texts in different courses and levels of complexity.Second, reviewing the literature revealed the limited empirical studies addressing reading anxiety associations to the two contexts of individual or collaborative learning and the lack of studies investigating its correlation to using types of outlining as reading strategies.The study aimed at identifying the difference in the impact of a student-constructed outlining versus expert-constructed outlining on English majors' reading comprehension in two different contexts; collaborative learning and individual learning.Accordingly, the study addressed the following questions: 1. To what extend do the four treatment groups formed by the type of outlining (students-vs.expert-constructed) and learning mode (collaborative vs. individual) differ in terms of reading comprehension? 2. How do the four treatment conditions affect English majors' reading comprehension?

Methods
The study adopted the experimental 2 3 2 factorial design to investigate the impact of independent variables; the mode of outlining (students vs. expert outlining) within two different learning models (individual vs. collaborative).As indicated in Table 1, the study examined the impact of the variables across four applications on reading comprehension of long texts which served as the dependent variable.

Participants
A total of 161 female English majors in Saudi Arabia aged from 21 to 23 (M = 21.6) agreed to participate in the current study.They were registered in levels two and three in reading courses in semester 1, 2022 and were assigned randomly to the four treatment conditions.Table 1 shows the number of students in each condition.
All participants had the same academic English backgrounds.The similar reading proficiency level of the groups was examined using ANOVA analysis of their scores in the last reading course they studied (Reading 1).Results indicated that the participants' level was homogenous and there were no significant differences between them (M = 75.9,SD = 1.19, p = .117).All groups were matched in terms of language proficiency and gender.

Instruments
The study used two different testing packages.The First testing package included a text of 770 words, and a test consisting of 20 four-distractor multiple-choice display items.The reason for the selection of display questions was to reduce the effect of mental processes and call only for one specific information processing path that requires learners to accurately recall text information linearly.In this way, the only responsible parameters of the test were intensive reading and linguistic knowledge.The package was piloted before the main experiment to compute the test reliability (a = .73).The Second testing package

Data Analysis
The study questions aimed to investigate the probability of significant differential impacts of the four conditions on the students' reading comprehension.An F-test for variance was run to calculate the significance of the mean scores' differences across the two types of outlining (students-constructed vs. expert-constructed) within two different modes of learning (collaborative vs. individual).
A two-way ANOVA test and a post-hoc test were run to analyze students' scores in the reading comprehension test for a statistically significant condition difference and identify the most effective mode across the four conditions.

Results
The results are presented according to the sequence of study questions.Data shown in Table 2 presents an answer to question 1: To what extend do the four treatment groups formed by the type of outlining (students-vs.expert-constructed) and learning mode (collaborative vs. individual) differ in terms of reading comprehension?
Table 2 depicted the differences in mean scores of the four groups in all applications.The CS group occupied the highest place across the four applications (M = 16.14, SD = 2.31), followed by the CE group which ran a close second (M = 10.43,SD = 1.69), followed by the IS (M = 12.95, SD = 3.36) and finally the IE group (M = 8.54, SD = 2.37).
The individual group's mean scores were higher in the students-constructed outlining treatment (IS) than those in the expert-constructed outlining one (IE).The results indicated that providing expert-constructed outlines improved the participants' reading comprehension in all groups.These results provided an answer to the first question as they revealed the impact of student-versus expert-constructed on English majors' reading comprehension.The collaborative group outperformed the individual group in both types of outlining enhancement, and this provided an answer to the second question since they revealed the significance of these differences.F-Test for variance was run to calculate the significance of the revealed differences between the participants' mean scores in the two input types within the four groups.
Data shown in Tables 3 and 4 presents an answer to question 2: How do the four treatment conditions affect English majors' reading comprehension?
To calculate Equality of Error Variance, Levene's Test was used, and the p-value was found to be larger than .05(F = .4026,p = .815).Based on this, the 2 3 2 two-way ANOVA test was run for the four applications.Table 3 depicted the significant ANOVA results, revealing a significant impact of the learning mode (collaborative vs. individual), F(1, 161) = 141.414,p \ .05,and also a significant impact of the type of outlining (students-vs.expert-constructed), F(1, 161) = 38.330,p \ .05.No significant interaction impact between type of outlining and learning mode was found, F (1, 161) = 2.5400, p ..05.
Basing on ANOVA results, a post-hoc Bonferroni comparisons of the four groups' means of scores on reading comprehension revealed that the CS group significantly outperformed the CE, IS, and IE groups (p \ .05).This means that among the four groups, CS group achieved the best scores in the reading comprehension test as indicated in Table 4. Additionally, the CE group significantly outperformed the IE and IS groups (p \ .000).The IS group outperformed the IE group as well (p = .000).

Discussion
The current study limited its focus to answer two questions.The first question was: To what extend do the four treatment groups formed by the type of outlining (studentsvs.expert-constructed) and learning mode (collaborative vs. individual) differ in terms of reading comprehension?
The quantitative data revealed that there were statistically significant differences among the score means of the four groups in the two different outlining modes, student-constructed versus expert-constructed outlining, favoring the former mode.Generally, this finding coincides with some previous findings confirming that students have benefited more by developing their outlines as opposed to students who used expert-constructed outlines (Boyle & Weishaar, 1997;Chang et al., 2002;Redford et al., 2012).A justification for the better performance of the student-constructed outlining group over the expert-constructed outlining one is what Glynn and di Vesta (1977) have earlier suggested about students' duty of outline completion, note-taking for the headings, and detailing information to connect the outline to the main text.Pudelko et al. (2012) explained that when students are involved in mapping or outlining, it promotes higher-level thinking and reasoning skills, and is not just seen to be a way of developing lower-order skills such as memorization and recall.When teachers provide students with visual representations of a text, they aim to help students with presenting a macrostructure of the text.Although this may save time and effort as students receive a guide when reading focusing on the main point in the text, it may have negative effects as well.Similar findings by Chang et al. (2002) supported the notion that presenting the text accompanied by an expert's illustration might put the readers in a position in which they only passively take in knowledge from experts with little autonomous learning on their part.Accordingly, students themselves have to construct their knowledge when attending to the main features of the text.It can be rationalized that by training students to construct outlines by themselves, teachers can save time and effort, and guide students to use a top-down technique that may improve recall and maximize their comprehension.The current result is also in line with the major tents of Constructivist theory.It uses outlines as the main tools of organizing information for learning depending of the claim that ''constructivist learning occurs when learners actively create their knowledge by trying to make sense out of material that is presented to them'' (Mayer, 1999, p. 143).
Despite the contradicted findings related to the superiority of teacher or expert-constructed over student-constructed outlines (Moradi et al., 2020), two decades ago, Boyle and Weishaar's (1997) findings accorded with the current ones since they enumerated the advantages of student-generated versus expert-generated outlines.Outlining is well recognized as a useful tool for reading comprehension tasks and was thought to be more useful than being given a prepared outline with the main points of a lecture (Tsubaki & Nakayama, 2004).Another possible rationale for this result may be the degree of freedom and autonomy that the students have when they construct outlines themselves.Canas et al. ( 2012) have described the variation in learning outcomes achieved by students who were offered varing degrees of freedom in reorganizing and mapping a text.When students had total freedom to populate a map on content, they constructed more personal understanding and were supported.
The second question of the study was: How do the four treatment conditions affect English majors' reading comprehension?The results revealed the superiority of the collaborative mode of reading and constructing the outline over the individual mode.This agrees with Jin et al.'s (2020) results confirming that collaboration has been found to facilitate comprehension of challenging academic texts.These results are also supported by a significant body of research (Babapour et al., 2019;Hirano, 2015;Ohata & Fukao, 2014;Vaughn et al., 2013).This might also suggest implications for further research on the topic of collaborative construction and reorganization of texts.This result indicates that collaboration in small groups helps accomplish learners' shared goals, and higher achievement on the individual level (Teng & Reynolds, 2019).It also contributes to provide a piece of evidence that cognitive organizers, such as outlines when constructed by the readers themselves collaboratively, are effective in improving reading comprehension outcomes.
The contribution of this finding relates to the collaborative learning setting.For example, Shih and Reynolds (2015) found that collaboration may enable learners to engage in peer interactions, raise motivation, urge argument, negotiation, and reasoning while reading.They suggest that collaborative learning may figure out learners' capacity to pool ideas, enhance each other with feedback, and help identify and solve reading problems.
To summarize, collaborative learning may be beneficial to learners' reading because it leads to high scores in reading comprehension, but this impact is likely to be dependent on student-construction of outlines as an adjunct representation of reading texts.This finding may be a contribution to recent literature on cognitive organizers and lead to further investigations of the necessity of integrating collaboration in all language learning processes.The current findings may be regarded as further evidence and insights into the potential of collaboration and student-construction of text representations in reading.

Conclusion
This study reports on an investigation of the difference in the impact of a student-constructed outlining versus expert-constructed outlining on English majors' reading comprehension in two different contexts; collaborative learning and individual learning.The significance of this topic was justified by some facts.First, outlines serve as guides for facilitating the retrieval of information by providing specific cues that are applied during the learning experience (Ormrod, 2008).Second, research projects that focus on the examination of collaboration in language classes are currently receiving more attention.However, most studies have centered on individual reading, and few studies have focused specifically on collaborative reading.Third, little attention was paid to collaborative learning in the college EFL context.The current results revealed a significant difference in the performance of the four groups favoring the studentconstructed outlining one, and the superiority of the collaborative mode of reading and constructing the outline.These findings indicate that students' construction of knowledge in collaborative mode of learning positively influenced the learners' reading comprehension.They draw attention to the need for further studies investigating the effectiveness of collaborative learning in teaching other language skills.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:

Table 1 .
The Factorial Design and Participants in the Four Conditions.

Table 2 .
Descriptive Statistics for Participants' Scores.

Table 3 .
ANOVA Results for the Four Applications of the Reading Comprehension Tests.

Table 4 .
Post-hoc Test for the Four Applications of the Reading Comprehension Test. *p\.05.