Students’ Social-Cognitive Engagement in Online Discussions: An Integrated Analysis Perspective

Abstract

Grounded on constructivism, mining a complex mix of social and cognitive interrelations is key to understanding collaborative discussion in online learning. A single examination of one of these factors tends to overlook the impact of the other factor on learning. In this paper, we innovatively constructed a socialcognitive engagement setting to jointly characterize social and cognitive aspects. In the online discussion forum, this study jointly characterized students’ social and cognitive aspects to investigate interactive patterns of different social-cognitive engagements and social-cognitive engagement evolution across four periods (i.e., creation, growth, maturity, and death). Multi-methods including social network analysis, content analysis, epistemic network analysis, and statistical analysis was applied in this study. The results showed that the interactive patterns of social-cognitive engagement were affected by both social network position and cognitive level. In particular, students’ social network position was a vital indicator for the contributions to cognitive level of students, and cognitive level affected the related interactions to some extent. In addition, this study found a nonlinear evolutionary development of students’ social-cognitive engagement. Furthermore, maturity is a critical period on which teachers should focus, as the co-occurrence of social-cognitive engagement reaches a maximum level in this period. Based on the results, this multi-perspective analysis including social and cognitive aspects can provide insightful methodological implications and practical suggestions for teachers in conducting in-depth interactive discussions.