Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer

ConferencingNorm Friesen

May 6, 2006

Terms & Concepts

• Critical community of Inquiry: group engaging collaboratively in practical inquiry; usually includes a teacher

• Cognitive presence: the construction and confirmation meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry

• Cognitive Presence ≈ Critical inquiry

Practical Inquiry Model

Practical Inquiry

Two Dimensions:

1. continuum between action and deliberation

2. transition between concrete and abstract worlds; cognitive processes that associate facts and ideas

Four Phases (1 through 3)

1. Triggering Event: an issue, dilemma, or problem that emerges from experience is identified or recognized.

2. Exploration: participants shift between the private, reflective world of the individual and the social exploration of ideas

3. Integration: characterized by constructing meaning from the ideas generated in the exploratory phase: reflection discourse

Four Phases (4th)

Resolution:

• testing the hypothesis by means of practical application

• a vicarious test using thought experiments and consensus building within the community

Critical Inquiry and CMC

• The CMC transcript is valuable in that it provides an accurate record of nearly all the dialogue and interaction that took place

• There is no body language or paralinguistic communication

Triggering Events

• Asking questions

• Background info that culminates in a

question

• Messages that take discussion in a new

direction

Exploration

• Personal narratives/descriptions/facts

• Divergence within community or within a message:– Unsubstantiated contradiction of previous

ideas– many themes in one message – unsupported opinions

Integration

• Agreement within community or within a single message

• Integrating information from various sources

• Justified yet tentative hypotheses

Resolution

• Vicarious application to real world

• Testing solutions

Study of 24 messages; 1 week

Triggering 8%

Exploration42%Integration13%Resolution 4%

Conclusion

• “We believe such an approach is capable of refining the concept and model presented here to the point where it can be a reliable and useful instructional tool for realizing higher-order educational outcomes.”

Excursus on Content Analysis

• This is an example of content analysis• a standard methodology in the social

sciences for studying the content of communication

• objectively and systematically identifying specified characteristics of messages.

• Describe and make inferences about the character of communications

Word counting

• Early and simple version is to count word occurrences

• KWIC and KWOC indexes developed for this purpose

• Zipf's law: words and phrases mentioned most often reflect the most important concerns

• "Primitive" version of this using Google• The issue of inference arises

Other approaches• Coding frames used: identify concerns,

infer concerns, themes, processes, etc. from text and label them

• For example: Global Warming coverage– Types of guests or "experts" in news shows– In what contexts it is mentioned? Science,

lifestyle, Economics, national/international politics

• Other examples? (e.g. "issues, qualifications, horse race, and hoopla)

Issues and Problems

• inter-coder reliability and intra-coder reliability:– Is a coder or group of coders consistent across

time?– Is a coder consistent with other coders?

• Process of inference– "Television is the primary source of presidential

election information for the majority of Americans" (Graber 1993; Hernandez 1997)

– Discussion topics and themes reflect actual group or mental processes

Rourke (2005)

• “I analyzed the messages and the interview transcripts using qualitative content analysis techniques associated with grounded theory, and I employed measures to promote trustworthiness associated with naturalistic research.”

• 15 weeks, 67 weeklong conferences for small groups

Potential Problem

• There may be a variety of technical, access, or deeper social, psychological, and educational inhibitors to participation in the conference, which means that the transcript of the conference is a significantly less-than-complete record of the learning that has taken place within the community of inquiry.

Findings

Their activities included:

1. providing others with praise and encouragement,

2. presenting informal arguments,

3. engaging in discursive explorations

4. making connections between course topics and their personal experiences

Rourke, Findings, con’t

• “Contrary to constructions of this technology in our literature, the students did not approach the conferences as forums for critical discourse or collaborative meaning making.”