| The purpose of this study is to learn more about ways to promote critical thinking skills in this emerging learning environment and to investigate the impact of the cognitive structuring methods on students' critical thinking skill development.; For the purposes of this study, we identified critical thinking skills as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, based on Bloom's (1956) taxonomy of learning objectives in the cognitive domain. We also identified three cognitive structuring methods in online collaborative learning environment: suggesting framework, progress review, and message labeling.; For the experiment 78 Subjects were divided into four groups, one control group, which received no cognitive structuring method, and one group for each of three different cognitive structuring methods. The transcripts of the posttest and online discussion were analyzed with protocol analysis. For statistical analysis we applied loglinear analysis and series of Chi-square tests to see group differences on each type of critical skill.; The analysis produced mixed results regarding the impact of suggesting cognitive structuring methods on critical thinking skill enhancement produced. We also found a discontinuity between the discussion session and posttest session. This discontinuity suggests to us that having longer time duration would improve the test results. Our finding also suggests that using cognitive structuring methods that depend on too complicated or overriding use of technology would decrease the effectiveness of the methods. |
