Impacts of Student Categorization of Their Online Discussion Contributions

This study examined the impacts of online graduate students categorizing their online discussion contributions according to an instructor’s criteria. Student messages before and after this catego-rizing activity were unitized by terminal punctuation; classified for function, skill, and level; and analyzed based on Henri and Rigault’s (1996) content analysis framework. There was an unexpected decrease in the quantity of messages following the treatment. Even more surprising was the decrease in four quality measures of cognitive dialogue: percentage cognitive unit among four functions, percentage inference and percentage analysis or elaboration (or in-depth clarification) among five cognitive skills, and percentage high-level processing. This treatment seems to have inhibited cognitive dialogue, although qualitative data suggested that there may have been some advantages for some students. In online, text-based education, transactional distance, or “the gap of understanding and communication between teachers and learners caused by geographic distance ” (Moore and Kearsley 2005, 223) creates diffi-culties in communication due to restrictions on verbal and visual cues. Online dialogue, or positive interactions aimed at increasing student understanding (Moore 1993), is a tool often used in education. Providing students with feedback on the quality of their dialogue increases demand on instructors ’ time and thus may be prohibitive. This study investigated the impact of an intervention that did not require instructor feedback, but instead entailed each student self-categorizing his or her previous asynchronous online discussion contributions to determine whether this could be effective in improving the quantity or quality of students’ cognitive dialogue