Students’ Knowledge Construction and Group Cognition from Online Inquiry: Evidence from Quantitative, Qualitative, and Knowledge Structure Analysis

This paper reports a mixed-methods study about the effects of initiator-response (IR) during online inquiry on students’ knowledge construction and group cognition. Thirty-six students were randomly assigned into ten groups, conducted online inquiry about a topic never covered in class, and blogged their findings for five weeks. Five groups were randomly selected to respond to the first blog post each week whereas the rest groups contributed to the teamblogs freely. Data analyses included correlating students’ individual and group rankings (as demonstrated in their team’s tagclouds) of concepts with the instructor’s ranking, computer-based content analysis of the blog posts, and thematic coding of participants’ and instructor interviews. Results revealed that the IR requirement promoted individual learning and group cognition in some teams. The subsequent analyses revealed that free style encouraged idiosyncratic learning whereas the IR style heightened sense of responsibility in team leaders.