The effects of three types of instructor posting on critical thinking and social presence: No posting, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction

Jamie Costley

Abstract


As more and more institutions are using asynchronous forums as the main or only means for students to interact online, the need to understand the effects of instructor intervention on learner discourse has become more important.  This study will describe the effects of different types of instructor posting on learners’ levels of critical thinking and social presence. The research involved taking 900 learner posts from three differing experimental conditions and analyzing those posts for social presence and critical thinking.  The three experimental conditions were no instructor posting, posts containing facilitating discourse, and posts containing direct instruction. The results showed instructor posts that facilitate discourse generate higher levels of social presence when compared to the other two conditions, and instructor posts that contain direct instruction increase critical thinking.  These results are important in general, because instructors must be aware of how their behavior may affect how learners interact (and therefore learn) online. More specifically, the types of discourse their learners create, are of interest to many instructors. Therefore, the ways instructors can manipulate learner discourse is of great importance.


Keywords


posting, critical thinking, social presence, learner behaviour, asynchronous learning networks

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