In order for students to constructively interact for rebuilding their own thoughts with peers, they should hold initial understanding of a topic before starting a discussion. The initial understanding should consist of both concrete evidence and abstract summaries that can be re-related to each other in discussion. This paper analyzed the effect of scaffolding for constructing initial understandings in university. “Question-Answer Tool” (Q-A tool) was provided to help students to extract structural elements such as theme, experiment procedure, results, implications, and assertions from research findings about cognitive science for a collaborative learning called“Dynamic Jigsaw. ” Students explain research findings to each other and summarize multiple research find- ings with their colleagues in the Dynamic Jigsaw. “ReCoNote” was also provided for students. It imports the extracted elements into each student’s concept map to support making relations among the elements. We compared 19 students who were supported by the Q-A tool and ReCoNote in 2004 and 17 students who were only supported by ReCoNote in 2003 using design experiment paradigms to measure the effect of the Q-A tool. All the concept maps and three explanations about research findings per group were analyzed. The Q-A tool-supported students could describe implications and asser- tions with appropriate evidence in their concept maps. In contrast, the non-supported students could refer to evidence but not implications or assertions. Furthermore, the Q- A tool-supported students described their original advanced implications drawn from the research findings through making relations between the structural elements and their original thoughts, and prepared summaries using two of the research findings by comparing and relating the two research findings’ structural elements in constructive interaction with peers.