Community of inquiry as a theoretical framework to foster “epistemic engagement” and “cognitive presence” in online education

Abstract

In this paper, several recent theoretical conceptions of technology-mediated education are examined and a study of 2159 online learners is presented. The study validates an instrument designed to measure teaching, social, and cognitive presence indicative of a community of learners within the community of inquiry (CoI) framework [Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2, 1–19; Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 7–23]. Results indicate that the survey items cohere into interpretable factors that represent the intended constructs. Further it was determined through structural equation modeling that 70% of the variance in the online students’ levels of cognitive presence, a multivariate measure of learning, can be modeled based on their reports of their instructors’ skills in fostering teaching presence and their own abilities to establish a sense of social presence. Additional analysis identifies more details of the relationship between learner understandings of teaching and social presence and its impact on their cognitive presence. Implications for online teaching, policy, and faculty development are discussed.

Introduction

Rapid growth in online teaching and learning is well documented and online learning environments continue to evolve. A recent national survey (Allen & Seaman, 2007) estimated that 3.5 million students are enrolled in fully online courses in the US, roughly 20% of all college students. These authors also conclude that, with enrollment growth rates about six times traditional, classroom-based learning, online courses will continue to represent the fastest growing instructional modality in higher education. With an aging population and increased demand for higher education this trend may not be surprising; the National Center for Education Statistics (US Department of Education and National Center for Education Statistics, 2007) indicates that there will be record numbers of college enrollments through 2016, increasingly populated with non-traditional students. Online education represents a significant means to higher education for this segment of the population.

Such rapid growth and evolution presents numerous challenges to educators. Some of these are related to technology and others to pedagogy. Designers of online courses, faced with a growing number of disciplines (online math, science, history, philosophy, etc.) and an ever changing array of new media (streaming video, blogs, wikis, etc.), are often confused about how to integrate these technologies into online learning environments in ways that will enhance student learning of diverse content. Frequently missing from attempts to address these challenges are the roles of theoretical and conceptual frameworks. It is argued here that what is needed is a model that provides online faculty and instructional designers a mechanism for integrating technology and pedagogy in ways likely to impact learning across the many disciplines now available via online education. This paper investigates, and seeks to articulate and extend recent promising theories and presents results of a study of one theoretical model, the community of inquiry framework.

At a descriptive level online education has been well defined and characterized through the three lenses proposed by Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt (2006) which include presentational, performance-tutoring, and epistemic engagement views. Citing a long history of distance education and attendant technological advances the authors identify the recent multimedia and immersive online environments as the closest approximation to the versatility and corollary advantages of classroom teaching. This presentational conception of online educational environments is not unproblematic however, and the authors are careful to remind us that presentation alone is insufficient to the preservation and enhancement of learning in and beyond the classroom. In the absence of clear explanations provided by a capable instructor, for example, even the most dynamic technology-mediated representations may be of little use to learners.

Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt also articulate a performance-tutoring view of online education suggesting that the promises of this conceptual perspective include the enactment of “learning by doing”; automated adaptation of instruction to the needs of the learner, and individualized critical assistance to many learners. This perspective is also not without concerns. The authors remind us that the development of performance-tutoring systems is expensive, and not readily adaptable to the many domains of instruction now being carried out online. The cognitive view of learning upon which performance-tutoring systems are founded is also seen as incompatible with social perspectives, predicated less on acquisition and more on participation metaphors of learning (Lave, 1997, Sfard, 1998, Sfard and Prusak, 2005).

The third perspective discussed by Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt is referred to as the epistemic-engagement view. Here, the authors discuss the potential for online learning to reflect processes of participatory practice, with designs that gradually assist learners to develop the language and skills of a disciplinary discourse community. In this view, online environments can encourage knowledge construction through social interaction and negotiation of meaning largely through asynchronous communication. While research in this area is promising (e.g. Arbaugh, 2008, Correia and Davis, 2008, Liu et al., 2007, Moore, 2008, Wise et al., 2008) Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt’s caveat is that networked interaction per se is insufficient to the development of a community of reflective learners. This is an important note, one which requires further explication and to which we shall return in discussing the community of inquiry framework below.

A number of more specific and promising frameworks for technology-mediated teaching and learning exist. One recent approach is the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) model, which embodies both the presentational and performance-tutoring views of Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt. The authors of TPCK, Mishra and Koehler (2006) review the historical separation of teacher knowledge of pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge. This divide was addressed by Shulman (1986) who found that teacher education programs often focused on either knowledge of content or general knowledge of pedagogy but seldom an integration of the two. Quoting Schulman (1986), Mishra and Koehler (2006), argue that the bifurcation of disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical knowledge was a major barrier to the improvement of instruction in schools.

With the advent of Schulman’s pedagogical content knowledge model (PCKM) (1987) educators and researchers had a new tool with which to analyze, understand, and improve learning. Schulman described PCK as “the content knowledge that deals with the teaching process”, such as ‘‘the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others’’ including ‘‘the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations.’’ Citing Schulman, the authors Mishra and Koehler, suggest that technology has a large role to play in enacting PCK. They argue that in the 21st century, providing powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, and demonstrations to support learning requires knowledge of how to employ technologies to best effect.

Ranging from drawings on a blackboard or interactive multimedia simulations to etchings on a clay tablet or web-based hypertexts to the pump metaphor of the heart or the computer metaphor of the brain, technologies have constrained and afforded a range of representations, analogies, examples, explanations, and demonstrations that can help make subject matter more accessible to the learner (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p. 1023).

Mishra and Koehler argue that, much as knowledge of pedagogy and knowledge of content were treated as if they were independent before the work of Schulman and other scholars, we have also historically treated knowledge about technology independently from both pedagogy and content. They advocate for the integration of technology in the pedagogical content knowledge model. They add, “Teachers will have to do more than simply learn to use currently available tools; they also will have to learn new techniques and skills as current technologies become obsolete” (Mishra & Koehler, 2006, p. 1023).

Among these skills, the most significant for impacting cross discipline online course outcomes are those that focus not only on the provision of direct instruction, as is suggested by the TPCK, but also on learners and learning. The TPCK focuses on direct instruction with an emphasis on the instructor-provided representations, analogies, examples, explanations, and demonstrations with the aid of technologies. While an emphasis of teacher knowledge of technology-mediated direct instructional strategies is necessary for a model to ensure quality in online (and traditional) environments, it is not sufficient. Recent conceptions of knowledge development, especially those informed by socio-cognitive perspectives, indicate that learners must play a much larger role in the educational process. Ensuring that students become more equal participants in attaining learning goals requires that they become more active in and responsible for their learning. Further, the TPCK is a model that focuses primarily on classroom instruction that is augmented by the use of technology. While conceptually useful, such a model is less than adequate for describing, explaining, and enhancing student learning in purely online environments. A model that focuses more directly on teaching and learning in completely technology-mediated milieus is more likely to prove productive.

We have such a model in the community of inquiry framework (CoI) (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). Much as the TPCK model embodies features of the presentational and performance-tutoring views, the community of inquiry model reflects the epistemic engagement view of Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt. Accommodating their caution about the insufficiency of interaction per se to promote the development of online learning communities, the CoI framework is an attempt to understand the social, technological, and pedagogic processes that do lead to collaborative knowledge construction. As such it represents an effort to deal with the greatest challenge to the quality of online education discussed by Larreamendy-Joerns and Leinhardt through the epistemic engagement approach, dialogic pedagogy: “(…) successfully orchestrating a dialogue demands fairly sophisticated skills. Conversational contributions need to be simultaneously parsed according to their disciplinary value, their location within the chain of collective argumentation, their relevance to the instructional goals, and their role as indicators of the student’s ongoing understanding. The outcome of this complex appraisal is a sense of the amount and quality of the guidance that specific contributions and the conversation as a whole require to support learning.” (Larreamendy-Joerns & Leinhardt, 2006, p. 591)

The community of inquiry framework (CoI) focuses on the intentional development of an online learning community with an emphasis on the processes of instructional conversations that are likely to lead to epistemic engagement. The model articulates the behaviors and processes required to nurture knowledge construction through the cultivation of various forms of “presence”, among which are teaching, social, and cognitive presence. According to the authors, it is through the skillful marshalling of these forms of presence that online faculty and students, in collaboration, develop a productive online learning environment through which knowledge is constructed. This emphasis on facilitating learning includes, but is not limited to, direct instructional approaches emphasized in the TPCK model. Beyond direct instruction (well described by TPCK) the teaching presence component of the CoI model also focuses attention on the design and organization of instruction, and especially the facilitation of productive discourse among students.

What is more, in it articulation of social presence the CoI model also emphasizes the needs for online learners to be able to address the challenge of projecting themselves as “real people”. This facet of the model is significant for online education in that face-to-face interaction, and the conventions of non-verbal communication that underlie a great deal of the flow of instructional conversation (and understandings that emerge from it), is often not possible, especially in the dominant form of online learning, asynchronous learning networks. The model assumes that this is a necessary component of a productive community of inquiry and that the online instructor is responsible to foster an environment of satisfactory social presence (Garrison et al., 2000, Rourke et al., 1999, Swan and Shea, 2005). This paper therefore investigates the impact of teaching presence on the development of social presence. Articulating the new affordances and constraints on social and affective processes foundational to learning, and strategies for leveraging or overcoming these, are necessary components of a conceptual framework that supports our understanding and development of current and future online environments.

In addition to social presence, the model also highlights “cognitive presence” which is defined as “the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 5). The notion of cognitive presence “reflects higher-order knowledge acquisition and application and is most associated with the literature and research related to critical thinking” (Garrison et al., 2000, p. 7). This focus on critical thinking as a foundation for the model is consistent with current conception of the role of higher education vis-a-vis student learning. This paper therefore investigates the relationship between teaching presence, and social presence and the development of cognitive presence.

It should be noted here that the CoI framework suggests that the components do not exist in isolation (Garrison et al., 2001, Garrison et al., 2000), but rather each can be seen as an overlapping set of lenses. While this representation implies that each of the forms of presence is related to the others, and that the three combine within a community of inquiry, specific relationships and direction of influence remain to be confirmed. In this study we investigate the conjecture that teaching presence, defined as learner ratings of explicit instructor actions involving instructional and organization, facilitation of discourse, and direct instruction, are a predictor of variance in learner ratings of social presence and cognitive presence. Furthermore it is hypothesized that social presence plays a mediating role in ratings of cognitive presence. The conceptual framework tested here is that teaching presence, i.e. the instructors design choices, discourse facilitation, and direct instruction impacts students’ positive and negative perceptions of the quality of the online learning milieu (social presence) and their ratings of their ability to construct meaningful knowledge in this environment (cognitive presence). The hypothesized direction of influence is both mediated, that is, teaching presence predicts variance in social presence which itself predicts variance in cognitive presence, and unmediated, i.e. teaching presence predicts variance in cognitive presence directly. This framework is modeled and tested here with data from more than 2000 online students.

Finally, student characteristics have been of interest to a variety of researchers of online environments (see Hiltz and Shea (2005) for example). The demographics investigated here are of interest because of their potential to impact the students’ sense of connectedness and learning—their levels of online “learning community” within the CoI framework. A number of researchers have hypothesized connections between age and levels of satisfaction and engagement with text-based online environments. This line of inquiry suggests that the emergent “net generation” is or will soon be too technologically sophisticated to find the typical, largely text-based, asynchronous learning management systems in use today relevant or useful for their learning (e.g. Dede, 2005, Manuel, 2002, Oblinger and Oblinger, 2005, Prensky, 2001). Academic level is included in the analysis for similar reasons, i.e. student age tends to vary by whether they are freshman, sophomore, juniors, or seniors of graduate students.

Others have reported previously (Shea, Li, Swan, & Pickett, 2005) on research that suggests an association between gender and capacity to establish and maintain social connections (Bostock and Lizhi, 2005, Goldstein and Sadhana, 2004, Shumaker and Hill, 1991, Vandervoort, 2000) which may carry over into online learning environments, and thus considered gender as a variable of possible interest.

A significant and growing body of conceptual and empirical literature exists which has attempted to articulate and expand upon the community of inquiry framework. These include attempts to outline (Garrison, 2007, Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007) and validate particular aspects of the model (Arbaugh and Hwang, 2006, Garrison and Cleveland-Innes, 2005, Shea et al., 2003, Shea et al., 2006, Shea et al., 2003, Shea et al., 2005, Swan and Shih, 2005). However, relatively little work has been undertaken to evaluate the model as a whole (although see Arbaugh, 2007, Ice et al., 2007) or to investigate the relationships of the components of the model.

To begin to determine the utility of the community of inquiry framework in describing, explaining, and ultimately improving learning in online educational environments it is useful to depict and test the constructs within it. This study uses several methodologies to achieve this objective. First, it was determined that a collaboration to develop a single instrument was necessary. The instrument used in this study was developed in cooperation with several other researchers interested in the community of inquiry framework (see acknowledgments below). To develop the overall CoI instrument, researchers who had developed previous scales and subscales (Arbaugh, 2007, Arbaugh and Hwang, 2006, Garrison and Cleveland-Innes, 2005, Garrison et al., 2004, Ice et al., 2007, Richardson and Swan, 2003, Shea et al., 2005, Shea et al., 2006, Swan, 2003, Swan and Shih, 2005) collaborated to integrate these validated works into a new, single coherent instrument. Items were discussed for inclusion or exclusion based on criteria for reflection of the CoI model as well as practical concerns such as overall length, redundancy, and readability. The instrument consisted of two sections: demographic information and the CoI survey items. Additional questions about the students overall satisfaction and learning were also asked. A provision for general comments in the form of an open ended question was also included. The CoI instrument contained 34 items, the content of which is displayed in Table 1. Responses to the items were to be provided on a five-point Likert type scale ranging from 1: “strongly agree” to 5 “strongly disagree”. For each question, the participants had the option to indicate that they choose not to answer the question by selecting “N/A”.

Research questions: Three research questions were examined through three complementary types of analysis.

Question 1: Does the instrument designed to measure learner perceptions of teaching, social, and cognitive presence result in and interpretable factor structure, reflecting the intended constructs? To address this question a factor analysis attempting to demonstrate construct coherence was conducted.

Question 2: What are the relationships between the teaching, social, and cognitive presence factors? Do teaching and social presence measures “predict” variance in cognitive presence measures as would be hypothesized by the model? Is perception of teaching and social presence a more powerful predictor of cognitive presence than demographics such as age or gender? We conducted a structural equation model to provide this further conceptual ordering and insight into the relationships within the framework.

Question 3: If teaching and social presence predict variance in measures of cognitive presence, what item level responses best demonstrate the relative significance of these two constructs in predicting cognitive presence? To better articulate the significant relationships that predict students’ understanding of their own knowledge construction – or “cognitive presence” we performed a CHAID analysis, which is described in more detail below.