Analyzing Students’ Cognitive Processing Patterns of A Socioscientific Issue Learning Activity with Online Discussion from A Process Perspective － Results of Quantitative Content Analysis and Lag Sequential Analysis

Abstract

Socioscientific issues (SSI) are frequently used to enhance student’s decision ability and critical thinking skills as SSI are generally ill-structured and lack of definite solutions. To help students be more immersed in the authentic problems, role-playing instructional strategy is commonly used. In this regard, this study thus employed a socioscientific issue role-playing learning activity, which students had to collaboratively work via asynchronous online discussion. While previous studies mostly focused on examining the collaboration outcomes, little attention has been paid to the collaboration process. Nonetheless, by inspecting learners’ behavioral patterns in the collaboration process, the instructors would be able to provide adequate guidance for learners’ can collaborate more efficiently. Therefore, this study seeks to propose a novel approach to depict the cognitive processing patterns that learners exhibited in the collaboration process by employing Quantitative Content Analysis (QCA) and Lag Sequential Analysis (LSA). Results of this study showed that students of different roles exhibited diverse cognitive processing patterns in online discussion. Results are discussed and expected to serve as guidance for conducting SSI related learning activity and subsequent collaborative learning research.