The impact of Internet technology on critical thinking is of growing interest among researchers. However, there still remains much to explore in terms of how critical thinking can be fostered through online environments for higher education. Ten years ago, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) published an article describing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework which provided an outline of three core elements that were able to describe and measure a collaborative and positive educational experience in an online learning environment, namely teaching presence (design, facilitation, and direct instruction), social presence (the ability of learners to project themselves socially and emotionally), and cognitive presence (the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse). This dissertation extends the body of research surrounding the CoI framework and also the literature on developing critical thinking in online environments by examining and exploring the extent to which teaching and social presence contribute to cognitive presence. The researcher was able to do this by offering 189 learners enrolled in 10 research methods courses and educational research courses an opportunity to use an innovative online resource (Research Design Learning Resource – RDLR) to assist them in learning about educational research and developing research proposals. By exploring how participants used this resource the researcher was able to gain insight into what factors contributed to a successful online learning experience and fostered cognitive presence. Quantitative and qualitative research approaches (mixed methods) were used in this study. The quantitative results indicated that both social and teaching presence had a strong positive relationship with cognitive presence and that learners generally perceived to have a positive learning experience using the RDLR. The qualitative findings helped elaborate the significant quantitative results and were organised into the following themes: making connections, multiple perspectives, resource design, being a self-directed learner, learning strategies, learning preferences, and barriers to cognitive presence. Future directions for critical thinking in online environments are discussed.

This study investigates how 4 newly admitted Chinese international graduate students participate in classroom discussions at a Canadian university. This qualitative research provides rich descriptions of their backgrounds and classroom participation, as well as their voices related to their classroom experiences. Framed by Language Socialization Theory, the study examines the classroom contexts where the students are socialized, particularly the social relations in the classroom that influence the 4 students’ participation. The study also investigates the role of the 4 students’ agency in the negotiation of access and participation in classroom discussions, as well as their identity formation in classroom communities. The findings of this research highlight the co-constructed and bi-directional nature of language socialization. The 4 students’ classroom experiences are not only shaped by their educational, cultural and social backgrounds, but are also jointly constructed by local contextual factors in Western classrooms. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.

This study investigates how 4 newly admitted Chinese international graduate students participate in classroom discussions at a Canadian university. This qualitative research provides rich descriptions of their backgrounds and classroom participation, as well as their voices related to their classroom experiences. Framed by Language Socialization Theory, the study examines the classroom contexts where the students are socialized, particularly the social relations in the classroom that influence the 4 students’ participation. The study also investigates the role of the 4 students’ agency in the negotiation of access and participation in classroom discussions, as well as their identity formation in classroom communities. The findings of this research highlight the co-constructed and bi-directional nature of language socialization. The 4 students’ classroom experiences are not only shaped by their educational, cultural and social backgrounds, but are also jointly constructed by local contextual factors in Western classrooms. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.

The impact of Internet technology on critical thinking is of growing interest among researchers. However, there still remains much to explore in terms of how critical thinking can be fostered through online environments for higher education. Ten years ago, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) published an article describing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework which provided an outline of three core elements that were able to describe and measure a collaborative and positive educational experience in an online learning environment, namely teaching presence (design, facilitation, and direct instruction), social presence (the ability of learners to project themselves socially and emotionally), and cognitive presence (the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse). This dissertation extends the body of research surrounding the CoI framework and also the literature on developing critical thinking in online environments by examining and exploring the extent to which teaching and social presence contribute to cognitive presence. The researcher was able to do this by offering 189 learners enrolled in 10 research methods courses and educational research courses an opportunity to use an innovative online resource (Research Design Learning Resource – RDLR) to assist them in learning about educational research and developing research proposals. By exploring how participants used this resource the researcher was able to gain insight into what factors contributed to a successful online learning experience and fostered cognitive presence. Quantitative and qualitative research approaches (mixed methods) were used in this study. The quantitative results indicated that both social and teaching presence had a strong positive relationship with cognitive presence and that learners generally perceived to have a positive learning experience using the RDLR. The qualitative findings helped elaborate the significant quantitative results and were organised into the following themes: making connections, multiple perspectives, resource design, being a self-directed learner, learning strategies, learning preferences, and barriers to cognitive presence. Future directions for critical thinking in online environments are discussed.

This study is based on my work as a teacher of Swedish language and literature to upper secondary school students, and my interest in developing the teaching of literature by using both new criticism theories and theories of literary perception focusing on reader response. The purpose of the study is to examine the learning process in trying to develop literary competence and to find out how to describe the competence shown by the students. My starting-point is a discussion about literary competence and the theory and model of literary competence by Örjan Torell. In examining literary competence, by how students use their constitutional competence as well as performance and literary transfer competences, Torell´s model shows the possibility and the need for both knowledge of literature and personal reception by focusing on the dialogue between author and reader. The method is qualitative and the empirics are material collected in one senior high school class in the Social Science programme during their second and third year. The material contains written reading logs, written answers to tasks and transcribed recordings of discussions of literature. The analysis shows a variety among the literary competence shown and developed by the students and points to the complexity of understanding the concept of literary competence. The model proves to be useful in focusing the teaching and learning of literature and the results indicate that teaching of literature by combining learning of epochs, genres, ideas and conceptions with personal reading is a valuable approach. Keywords: literary competence, literary teaching, literary reception, discussions of literature, reading logs, literary repertoire, text competence.

Nowadays, the rapid development of New Technologies of Information such as internet has a tremendous impact on people's life and environment. People now are not only using Blog and social network as a mean to share their life, but also they are using this platform to divulge and promote their diaries, articles, and life experiences. Fashion Guide, the most famous website in Taiwan, combining Blogs, social websites ,discussions forums is an eloquent example. This research is trying to find out whether Fashion Guide website has an influence on Taiwanese female purchasing behavior of cosmetics. This empirical evidence underscoring the impacts of websites such as Fashion Guide on females purchasing decision has the following outcomes: 1-Fashion Guide¡¦s members are over 80 percent and are mostly living in north of Taiwan, most of them are working for IT industries and their age range from 26 to 30 years old.2-The motivation of using the website lies on the fact that they are avoiding risks, above all the risk of getting the products they do not like.3-The members of Fashion guide find the discussion forums more trustworthy than social networks and Blogs.4-Most of members believe that Fashion Guide¡¦s website contents are more reliable than television commercials and suppliers cosmetics websites, therefore in the future marketing can make use of forums, social networks and blogs as a non-negligeable broadcasting platform.

Many studies report information overload (IO) as one of the main problems students encounter in computer-mediated communication (CMC). To date, researchers have paid little attention to the problem of IO—more specifically, to its impact on students’ quality interaction—in educational CMC. In an attempt to fill that gap, the purposes of this study were as follows: (a) to understand the difficulties students encounter that contribute to their perceptions of IO in CMC, (b) to observe the impact of those difficulties on students’ learning in online discussions, and (c) to identify students’ strategies for avoiding or managing those difficulties in order to engage in quality learning. Interviews with students and computer conferencing transcripts were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Interviews with 10 graduate students near the beginning of the semester revealed that although students were exposed to the same amount of information in the same learning environments, different individuals experienced different degrees of IO. Varied learner characteristics caused some students to be more susceptible to IO than others. The difficulties students encountered that contributed to their perceptions of IO included connection problems, navigation difficulties, discomfort with online communication, numerous ongoing discussion messages and endless resources, difficulty in organizing learning, and problems understanding the assigned readings. Those difficulties tended not to affect students’ deep processing as observed in their discussion messages, but might influence students’ online interaction with others. Students engaging in quality learning in online discussions were interviewed near the end of the semester to investigate their learning strategies. The results indicated that students used a variety of strategies to deal with those difficulties. Those strategies were related to online class preparation, identifying relevant information, processing online information and printed materials, keeping learning on track, organizing learning, and avoiding internal and external distractions. The results of this study have implications for course design.

<p>This study is based on my work as a teacher of Swedish language and literature to upper secondary school students, and my interest in developing the teaching of literature by using both new criticism theories and theories of literary perception focusing on reader response. The purpose of the study is to examine the learning process in trying to develop literary competence and to find out how to describe the competence shown by the students. My starting-point is a discussion about literary competence and the theory and model of literary competence by Örjan Torell. In examining literary competence, by how students use their constitutional competence as well as performance and literary transfer competences, Torell´s model shows the possibility and the need for both knowledge of literature and personal reception by focusing on the dialogue between author and reader.</p><p>The method is qualitative and the empirics are material collected in one senior high school class in the Social Science programme during their second and third year. The material contains written reading logs, written answers to tasks and transcribed recordings of discussions of literature.</p><p>The analysis shows a variety among the literary competence shown and developed by the students and points to the complexity of understanding the concept of literary competence. The model proves to be useful in focusing the teaching and learning of literature and the results indicate that teaching of literature by combining learning of epochs, genres, ideas and conceptions with personal reading is a valuable approach.</p><p>Keywords: literary competence, literary teaching, literary reception, discussions of literature, reading logs, literary repertoire, text competence.</p>

The purpose of this study was to describe and interpret young adult ESL (English as a Second Language) students‘ participation in discussions of literature in a high-intermediate level reading classroom at a university-affiliated ELP (English Learning Program) program. Additionally, this study explored the nature and characteristics of talk generated by ESL students within the context of literature discussions. Naturalistic methods of data collection were employed in keeping with the constructivist paradigm, including classroom observations, audio and video recordings, transcripts of audio and video recordings, field notes, interviews with the teacher and students, teacher resources, and student artifacts. This naturalistic inquiry drew from qualitative traditions in its design, and the study was further guided by grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and discourse analysis. The study findings indicated that literature discussions were structured by six stages: (1) reading at home, (2) setting up and review, (3) students redefining the tasks, vii (4) students doing the tasks, (5) sharing with the class, and (6) taking in-class quizzes. Analysis revealed that these sequenced stages that allowed for a shifting of roles and positions between the teacher and students and among students enabled students to have regular and extended opportunities for talk and interaction. The findings of the study demonstrated that the student-to-student exchanges featured more discursive talk as the students were encouraged to construct meanings collaboratively and to engage in interactive discourse with one another. The implications of these findings in terms of teaching as mediation and the nature of talk in ESL classrooms are discussed. / text

This work outlines the theoretical underpinnings, method, results, and implications for constructing a discussion list analysis tool that categorizes online, educational discussion list messages into levels of cognitive effort. Purpose The purpose of such a tool is to provide evaluative feedback to instructors who facilitate online learning, to researchers studying computer-supported collaborative learning, and to administrators interested in correlating objective measures of students’ cognitive effort with other measures of student success. This work connects computer–supported collaborative learning, content analysis, and artificial intelligence. Method Broadly, the method employed is a content analysis in which the data from the analysis is modeled using artificial neural network (ANN) software. A group of human coders categorized online discussion list messages, and inter-rater reliability was calculated among them. That reliability figure serves as a measuring stick for determining how well the ANN categorizes the same messages that the group of human coders categorized. Reliability between the ANN model and the group of human coders is compared to the reliability among the group of human coders to determine how well the ANN performs compared to humans. Findings Two experiments were conducted in which artificial neural network (ANN) models were constructed to model the decisions of human coders, and the experiments revealed that the ANN, under noisy, real-life circumstances codes messages with near-human accuracy. From experiment one, the reliability between the ANN model and the group of human coders, using Cohen’s kappa, is 0.519 while the human reliability values range from 0.494 to 0.742 (M=0.6). Improvements were made to the human content analysis with the goal of improving the reliability among coders. After these improvements were made, the humans coded messages with a kappa agreement ranging from 0.816 to 0.879 (M=0.848), and the kappa agreement between the ANN model and the group of human coders is 0.70.