Search

Online learning is one of the fastest growing trends in education. A practical problem faced by instructional designers and online instructors is how to design an interactive learning activity that benefits content mastery without adding technological barriers. The online discussion forum provides quick solutions because it is usually ready for use in mainstream online learning systems and affords peer interaction and online community building in a flexible manner. This dissertation sets the study site to asynchronous argumentative discussion, a type of online forum activity that minimizes the need of communication immediacy and maximizes the quality of communication. Asynchronous argumentative discussions can foster not only purposeful social interaction among online learners but also higher-order cognitive processing of learning content.Previous studies show promising results that learners engage in more cognitive elaboration and acquire argumentation knowledge when the discussion process is well facilitated. However, challenges exist due to the nature of asynchronous communication, the heavy load on reading and writing, and the declined participation before reaching learning objectives. This study applied self-regulated learning theory to explore the possible benefit of using self-regulatory strategies for asynchronous argumentative discussions. Specifically, the study examines how goals, writing, responding, and reflection strategies may influence students' participation performance from both quantity and quality aspects. The four research questions of the study are: (1) How do students set goals for asynchronous argumentative discussions? (2) Can goals predict students? participation quantity? (3) Can goals predict students' use of self-regulatory strategies (i.e., writing, responding, reflection strategies)? (4) What are the relationships between goals, self-regulatory strategies, and post quality? This study recruited 203 college students as participants from six sessions of an online learning technology course during Autumn 2019 and Spring 2020. In this course, students spent two weeks discussing around a controversial topic: "Will students learn the best when they are taught through their preferred learning style?" The discussion activity had two phases: a preparation phase and an interaction phase. In the preparation phase, students posted an evaluation of a credible source they found and drafted their initial arguments by the end of the first week. This initial argument writing was facilitated by an online source evaluation learning module. In the interaction phase, students responded to each other and produced refined arguments by the end of the second week. Students reported their goals in the preparation phase and their strategy use at the end of the discussion. Students' posts, metadata associated with each post (e.g., author, reply to whom, time), and forum visit logs were collected as the data sources. This study developed a scoring rubric to rate three aspects of students' goals: peer interaction tendency, learning commitment, and performance standard. Using these three scores, the study clustered the goals and discovered four configurations: (1) no goal, (2) performance-dominated goals, (3) self-dominant learning goals, and (4) peer interaction learning goals. Based on the four goal configurations, the results from analysis of variance and structural equation modeling suggested the advantages of setting peer interaction learning goals. The advantages are a higher level of participation quantity (i.e., more posts generated, more replies given, more unique reply targets), more frequent use of self-regulatory strategies for online discussions (i.e., writing, responding, reflection strategies), and better performance in the preparation phase (i.e., better quality of online source evaluation post). In contrast, students who set performance-dominated goals used responding strategies and reflection strategies less often, produced fewer posts, gave fewer replies to others, and responded to fewer unique peer learners. However, there was no statistically significant difference across goal configurations when comparing their argumentative post quality. The structural equation models suggested two mediator variables for goals to affect argumentative post quality. The effect of goals on initial argumentative post quality was mediated through writing strategy and source evaluation. Although goals were not directly associated with argumentative post quality, these findings together suggested that argumentative post quality was directly associated with source evaluation performance which could be improved by using more writing strategies. Because students who set peer interaction learning goals were more likely to more frequently use writing strategies, they had overall better performance in the asynchronous argumentative discussion, compared to the no-goal students and the students with performance-dominated goals. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]