A network analytic approach to integrating multiple quality measures for asynchronous online discussions

Abstract

Asynchronous online discussions within a community of learners can improve learning outcomes through social knowledge construction, but the depth and quality of student contributions often varies widely. Approaches to assessing critical discourse typically use content analysis to identify indicators that correspond to framework constructs, that in turn serve as measures of depth and quality. Often only a single construct is addressed for performing content analysis in the literature, although recent work has used both social presence and cognitive presence constructs from the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. Nevertheless, there is no effective, commonly used, analytic approach to combining insights from multiple perspectives about quality and depth of online discussions. This paper addresses the gap by proposing the combined use of cognitive engagement (the ICAP framework) and cognitive presence (CoI); and by proposing a network analytic approach that quantifies the associations between the two frameworks and measures the moderation effects of two instructional interventions on those associations. The present study found that these associations were moderated by one intervention but not the other; and that messages labelled with the most common phase of cognitive presence could be usefully assigned to smaller meaningful subgroups by also considering the mode of cognitive engagement.