Validating an Approach to Examining Cognitive Engagement Within Online Groups

Tools for measuring cognitive engagement within online groups have been concerned only with measuring an individual participant's cognitive engagement, without any concern for measuring cognitive engagement within groups. There remains a serious need for a scheme that measures cognitive engagement of groups and the validation of such a scheme against existing methods. The SQUAD (coding categories that are being measured, a semistructured approach for scaffolding online groups' engagement) approach to computer-mediated communication (CMC) discourse invites students within their respective groups to post messages based on five given categories: (a) suggestion, (b) question, (c) unclassified, (d) answer, and (e) delivery. In this article, the authors validated the SQUAD approach at the message level with an established framework called the practical inquiry model for assessing cognitive presence of CMC discourse. They adopted the alignments suggested by one of the developers of the Transcript Analysis Tool at sentence level to assess students' cognitive engagement within online groups in three case studies presented in this article. The authors argue that the cognitive presence attributed to the SQUAD approach has been empirically validated with respect to cognitive engagement within groups online. The three case studies illustrate the authors' approach to negotiating and reconciling problem-solving task requirements for software engineering online. The three groups of students made effective use of all the message categories for cognitive engagement within groups online.