LEVEL OF STUDENTS' CRITICAL THINKING ENGAGEMENT IN AN ONLINE INSTRUCTIONAL MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPMENT SCENARIO-BASED DISCUSSION FORUM

Abstract

The present study identified students’ level of critical thinking engagement (CTE) via a scaffolded asynchronous online discussion forum (AODF). It involved 31 fourth year students studying Instructional Multimedia Development course at the faculty of education of a Malaysian public university. Observations were made based on three major problem solving scenario-based tasks (PSST), which involved adapting instructional design theories and models, project management, and multimedia design fundamentals. These assessments covered a period of 10 weeks and supported by instructor scaffolding. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, the students’ transcripts (consisting of 662 posts with 1025 segments) were coded into four critical thinking engagement processes: clarification, assessment, inference, and strategies. Results showed that the most frequently used critical thinking engagement process was clarification, followed by assessment, strategies, and inference. However, although clarification was the dominant proportion, the total of low-level and high-level critical thinking engagements increased from one task to another. Low-level engagement related to clarification process declined when high-level engagement related to assessment and strategy processes increased. Further interview analyses revealed that apart from the online scenario-based discussion approach being a new experience for these students, they were also not trained to write higher-order thinking answers as they were used to only recalling facts. However, the promising trend of gradual increment of high-level engagement with a downward trend in clarification demonstrated that instructor scaffolding plays an important role in supporting students’ critical thinking engagement via AODF.