Cognitive and social interaction analysis in graduate discussion forums

• Main Authors: GOKARN NITIN, Mallika, GOTTIPATI, Swapna, SHANKARARAMAN, Venky
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
• Subjects: Interaction analysis; Online Discussion Forums; Cognitive analysis; Social network analysis; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4517; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5520/viewcontent/InteractionAnalysis_Full_Review.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Discussion forums play a key role in building knowledge repositories in an education institute. Asynchronous discussion forums enable part-time graduate professionals to have a better learning experience. This paper reports how a carefully curated discussion forum enhances the cognitive and social interactions among students in a graduate information systems course. In particular, we analyse the cognitive and social interactions and their impact on the student grades. To our surprise, the graduate students with their limited time resources, have higher order cognitive contributions and reasonable amount of social posts. We present the discussion forum design, cognitive and social behaviour analysis, grade analysis, and social network analysis. We use statistical methods and qualitative analysis to present our findings. Our findings provide useful insights that can be used in designing and implementing discussion forums in graduate business-technical courses.