Education Commons^™

Community Of Inquiry Framework And Learning Outcomes, Jennifer Ann Maddrell

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

First described by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000), the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework suggests social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence are essential elements to foster successful educational experiences in computer-mediated higher education distance learning environments. While hundreds of CoI-based articles have been published since 2000, those critical of the framework and related research suggested a lack of empirical evidence to support the framework's central claim that a CoI leads to deep and meaningful learning outcomes (Rourke & Kanuka, 2009). The current study, conducted with 51 graduate students in five distance education courses at the same university, compared the …