Education Commons^™

Statistical Discourse Analysis Of Online Discussion: Informal Cognition, Social Metacognition, And Knowledge Creation, M. M. Chiu, N. Fujita

Office of Open Learning Publications

To statistically model large data sets of knowledge processes during asynchronous, online forums, we must address analytic difficulties involving the whole data set (missing data, nested data and the tree structure of online messages), dependent variables (multiple, infrequent, discrete outcomes and similar adjacent messages), and explanatory variables (sequences, indirect effects, false positives, and robustness). Statistical discourse analysis (SDA) addresses all of these issues, as shown in an analysis of 1,330 asynchronous messages written and self-coded by 17 students during a 13-week online educational technology course. The results showed how attributes at multiple levels (individual and message) affected knowledge creation processes. …