Levels of cognition of instruction and of students' reflective thinking in a selected Web-enhanced course

The development of cognitive instruction, critical thinking, higher level of thinking and problem solving ability in students has been of great concern in the recent past. One way to examine the quality of instruction is to assess the cognitive levels of the teaching and students' reflective thinking. The purpose of this study was to describe the cognitive level of instruction and students' reflective thinking of a selected web-enhanced course at The Ohio State University. The target population for the study consisted of a web-enhanced course at OSU and thirteen graduate students who were enrolled in this course during the Spring Quarter of 2001. In this study, the modified version of Newcomb and Trefz's taxonomy was adopted to assess the cognitive level of teaching and students' reflective thinking. Based on Bloom's taxonomy, Newcomb and Trefz (1987) developed the modified version, which included four specific levels: (1) remembering, (2) processing, (3) creating and (4) evaluating. The results indicated that the most common cognitive level utilized by both teachers and students were the "processing" level and the "remembering" level was utilized least frequently of both of them. Results showed little difference existed between the distributions of the cognitive level of in-class and on-line instruction; however, the results did show that out-of-class assignments attained a higher cognitive level than in-class discourse and on-line course content. The "creating" level was the most common cognitive level utilized in out-of-class assignments. A training program is recommended for teachers who will teach a web-enhanced or web-based course. The program should contain: (1) the familiarity with the technology, (2) on-line class management skills and (3) pedagogical training, such as: higher cognitive level of teaching and the objective classification system.