COMPUTERS IN TEACHING A Discourse Analysis of Online Classroom Chats: Predictors of Cyber-Student Performance

We applied a discourse analysis (DA) to the electronic chat room discussions of a 16-week, Internet-based section of a class in statis-tical methods in psychology. This analysis revealed that across the semester, several DA categories (e.g., total number of student com-ments) were correlated with final grade in the class. An additional analysis involving only the chat room discussion of Week 3 revealed that 2 DA categories (i.e., student response to a problem or exam-ple given in lecture and total number of student comments) corre-lated with final grade in the class. We discuss the pedagogical implication of these results with regard to an instructor’s ability to identify early warning predictors of student performance in the vir-tual classroom. This study explored the possibility that a discourse analysis (DA) of the real-time (i.e., synchronous) communication that occurs in electronic chat rooms would reveal predictor