Abstract
Despite the prevalence of research on the community of inquiry framework and its associated measurement instrument, more research is needed to re-evaluate the factor structure, study the effects of covariates or measurement invariance, and explore the relationships amongst the three presences. Results of this study indicated that (a) teaching, social, and cognitive presence are each multidimensional and higher-order constructs; (b) measurement invariance was fully achieved for gender and partially for age, ethnicity, discipline, and online experience; (c) structural relationships of the three main constructs—teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence—suggested potential psychometric adjustments. The teaching presence construct in particular should be reconstructed to appropriately reflect and measure the construct as conceptually defined—as a distribution of teaching responsibility and authority—as opposed to how it is currently operationalized in the community of inquiry instrument—as a centralization of responsibility and authority with the instructor.
Highlights
Despite the prevalence of research on the Community of Inquiry framework and its associated measurement instrument, more research is needed to re-evaluate the factor structure, study the effects of covariates or measurement invariance, and explore the relationships among the three presences
Social presence has been shown to be the mediating factor between cognitive and teaching presence, cognitive presence is most indicative of student satisfaction and success (Holser & Arend, 2012; Yang, Quadir, Chen, & Miao, 2016), and teaching presence is understood to be of the greatest value to students (Hodges & Cowan, 2012; Preisman, 2014) and the most critical in establishing purposeful communities of inquiry (Borokhovski, Bernard, Tamim, Schmid, & Sokolvskaya, 2016; Rockinson-Szapkiw, Wighting, & Nisbet, 2016; Rubin & Fernandes, 2013)
Missing data patterns and multivariate normality assumption were examined before confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analyses were carried out
Summary
Despite the prevalence of research on the Community of Inquiry framework and its associated measurement instrument, more research is needed to re-evaluate the factor structure, study the effects of covariates or measurement invariance, and explore the relationships among the three presences. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is widely used in the design and study of online learning environments (Halverson, Graham, Spring, Drysdale, & Henrie, 2014; Garrison, 2017). The present study was designed to (a) re-evaluate the factor structure of the CoI instrument; (b) study the predictive effects of gender, ethnicity, age, online course experience, and course discipline on the CoI measurement model; and (c) explore the casual relationships among the three presences. The individual affective and expressive concerns of individuals are informative of and shaped by the learning community more generally In this way, within the CoI framework, affective communication, open communication, and group cohesion together form the social presence construct. Each of the three subfactors contributes both individually and corporately to the formation of social presence within a community of inquiry
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