The three research papers completed and compiled to make up this dissertation explore the relationship between social presence and social construction of knowledge in asynchronous online discussion forums in higher education courses in the instructional technology field. Paper 1 is a literature review of the interaction analysis model (IAM)…

Teaching of centripetal force in secondary education is a challenging task because of its central role in the circular and rotational motion. The specific equipment needed for experiments that explore the physical law which governs the centripetal force is usually limited in schools. The experiment presented in this paper, is based on a device…

This study compared the effects of extracurricular synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ASCMC) between students and teachers on students' digital reading performance at different frequencies. 392,269 samples from 53 countries/regions that participated in the Programme for…

Online exchange of sexual content ("sexting") is associated with potentially negative consequences, especially for girls. We investigated possible associations between family functioning and girls' sexting. Italian teenage girls (N = 250; M[subscript age] = 16.36 years; SD[subscript age] = 1.88) completed online surveys that evaluated…

Students in the online learning who have other responsibilities of life such as work and family face attrition. Constructing a model of engagement with smallest granule of time has not been implemented widely, but implementing it is important as it allows to uncover more subtle patterns. We built a student engagement prediction model using 9…

An online section of a face-to-face (F2F) undergraduate (bachelor's level) anatomy course with a prosection laboratory was offered in 2013-2014. Lectures for F2F students (353) were broadcast to online students (138) using Blackboard Collaborate (BBC) virtual classroom. Online laboratories were offered using BBC and three-dimensional (3D)…

The purpose of this research study was to examine rates, recipients, and predictors of teen sexting. A sample of 314 high school students in an urban area of Southeast Michigan were surveyed. Males were more likely to engage in nearly all forms of sexting. Impulsivity, frequency of electronic communication, peer pressure, peer sexting, and peer…

College students act on their professors' feedback less often and less completely than their professors would like. The problem this study addressed is that the relative predictive value of factors concerning graduate students in online courses acting on their professors' feedback is unknown. By focusing on graduate students in…

Introduction: Little is known about how group cohesion develops in online support group communities. Previous research suggests that message content, self-disclosure, and emotional expression may be central to this process. The purpose of this study was to identify linguistic and qualitative characteristics of participants' messages that…

Leveraging the knowledge of an organization is an ongoing challenge that has given rise to the field of knowledge management. Yet, despite spending enormous sums of organizational resources on Information Technology (IT) systems, executives recognize there is much more knowledge to harvest. Prediction markets are emerging as one tool to help…

Functional roles may explain the learning performance of groups. Detecting a functional role is critical for promoting group learning performance in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. However, it is not easy for teachers to identify the functional roles played by students in a web-based learning group, or the relationship…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…