Analysing students’ cognitive engagement in e-learning discussion forums through content analysis

Si Na Kew ,Zaidatun Tasir

doi:10.34105/j.kmel.2021.13.003

Abstract

Discussion forums provide students with accessible platforms for group discussions in e-learning environments. They also help lecturers to track and check student discussions. To improve student learning, it is important for lecturers to identify students’ cognitive engagement in discussion forums. Therefore, this study aims to investigate students’ cognitive engagement in e-learning through content analysis of forum posts. A total of 267 forum posts created by students during one semester were collected for analysis. Inferential statistics were applied to explore the relationship between students’ cognitive engagement and their gender and the number of posts in forums. The results revealed that about half of the students gave their posts without any explanations, which reflected a low level of cognitive engagement. A large number of posts made little contribution to a high level of cognitive engagement. The results also showed no relationship between gender and the level of cognitive engagement. The limitations and implications of this study are also discussed.

Highlights

As technology developments increase, many universities have adopted e-learning to improve their teaching and learning processes
Valencia-Vallejo, López-Vargas, and SanabriaRodríguez (2019), in their study, proposed that scaffolding can be used to assist students to interact with an e-learning environment, as the findings of the research revealed that scaffolding can help students to enhance their metacognitive ability, academic selfefficacy, and learning performance
Online discussion is one of the critical learning activities in e-learning for students to interact with others and express their ideas

Summary

Introduction

Many universities have adopted e-learning to improve their teaching and learning processes. One of the challenges in the e-learning environment is that educators are unable to observe students' learning participation through being present in the classroom and have less direct face-to-face interaction with students who participate in e-learning (Luo et al, 2017) and, in particular, in discussion forum activity. To solve this issue, the data generated by students when interacting with e-learning activities, such as the number of posts and replies, can be tracked and analysed to discover the students’ learning performances in e-learning. It is used to discover the hidden information about students (Mattingly et al, 2012) and predict the learning outcomes (Yin & Hwang, 2018)

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