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 statistical methods in psychology. This analysis revealed that across the semester, several DA categories (e.g., total number of student comments) 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 example given in lecture and total number of student comments) correlated 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 virtual classroom.