| Online discussion forums have become widely adopted as a supplement to in-class instruction as well as a primary venue for discourse in purely online learning contexts. Social connections and interactivity in online discussion have been identified as essential elements for successful learning experiences (Lapadat, 2002; Meyer, 2006; Schrage, 1990). In addition, reflection is considered to be a vital aspect of successful learning and helps learners look back on a performance, identify the important aspects of what is being learned, and consider how to improve it in the future (Collins, 2006; Lin et al., 1999; Schon, 1983; Schon, 1987). Accordingly, reflection strategies in online discussion can help students monitor their own thinking process, advance in-depth meaning making, and promote knowledge acquisition and transfer (Guldberg & Pilkington, 2007; McDuffie & Slavit, 2003; Way, 2009). However, connecting notions of self-reflection on performance in the context of online discussion environments has not been clearly established in the literature. In addition, studies on analyzing the quality of discussion contents and the depth of cognitive processing were relatively less explored although in-depth analysis is essential to understand students' learning progress and status.;The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of adaptive feedback on academic achievement, students' participation, and interaction patterns in online learning with group discussion activity. Also, this study proposes an efficient feedback generation method to support learners participating in online group discussion and eventually enhances reflective learning.;This field experimental study randomized the assignment of students (n=36) into either the treatment or control group to compare the effect of adaptive feedback. For this field experimental design study, the repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for the data analysis which aimed to measure multiple levels of each factor over time. Both quantitative data and qualitative data were collected from three online discussion sessions.;The results showed that the use of adaptive feedback was not effective in showing a significant difference between the treatment and the control group on academic achievement. However, the adaptive feedback helped students in treatment group engage in more intermediate and in-depth level of cognitive processing during online group discussion. In addition, the interaction pattern analysis revealed that students in the treatment group consistently participated with greater numbers of interactive messages than the control group during online group discussion. |
