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Record W4409360343 · doi:10.1016/j.nlp.2025.100146

Detecting cognitive engagement in online course forums: A review of frameworks and methodologies

2025· review· en· W4409360343 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueNatural Language Processing Journal · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicOnline and Blended Learning
Canadian institutionsAthabasca University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaAlberta Innovates
KeywordsCourse (navigation)Massive open online courseCognitionComputer sciencePsychologyData scienceWorld Wide WebEngineeringNeuroscience

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A key aspect of online learning in higher education involves the utilization of course discussion forums. Assessing the quality of posts, such as cognitive engagement, within online course discussion forums, and determining students’ interest and participation is challenging yet beneficial. This research investigates existing literature on identifying the cognitive engagement of online learners through the analysis of course discussion forums. Essentially, this review examines three educational frameworks - Van Der Meijden’s Knowledge Construction in Synchronous and Asynchronous Discussion Posts (KCSA), Community of Inquiry (CoI), and Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive (ICAP) , which have been widely used for students’ cognitive engagement detection analyzing their posts in course discussion forums. This study also examines the natural language processing and deep learning approaches employed and integrated with the above three educational frameworks in the existing literature concerning the detection of cognitive engagement in the context of online learning. The article provides recommendations for enhancing instructional design and fostering student engagement by leveraging cognitive engagement detection. This research underscores the significance of automating the identification of cognitive engagement in online learning and puts forth suggestions for future research directions.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.016
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.929
Threshold uncertainty score0.997

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.016
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.069
GPT teacher head0.496
Teacher spread0.426 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it