Instructor scaffolding and students' critical thinking through asynchronous online discussion forum

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential impact of instructor scaffolding types on students' critical thinking engagement, cognitive performance and general critical thinking skills. This study will be carried out in ten weeks and will involve38 undergraduate students that enrolled in CD-ROM Based Multimedia Development course. The independent variable of this study is the instructor scaffolding types while three assessment techniques namely the students' critical thinking engagement, cognitive performance and general critical thinking skills are the dependent variables. This study seeks to identify the dominant type of instructor scaffolding through AODF in order to further determine which type of the instructor scaffolds that might optimize students' cognitive outcomes. This kind of investigation could identify any correlation between the students' quality of postings exhibited in the AODF and the students' performance in the subject-specific cognitive performance test and general critical thinking test. This study is an exploratory study that adopts a quantitative approach, specifically utilizing the one-group pre-test post-test design with the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data. The findings of this study may further instructor's understanding of different students' need in a problem-solving scenario task activities discussion via the AODF, thus help them to better support the students towards more advanced forms of critical thinking.