OSCQR – Standard #30
Course provides activities for learners to develop higher-order thinking and problem solving skills, such as critical reflection and analysis.
Review These Explanations
Cognitive presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001). Where the learner thinks critically, he or she goes through the process of constructing knowledge, inquiring, exploring, and thinking.
Cognitive presence relies on critical thinking skills and active learning, as well helping learners to connect existing ideas and create new knowledge. This can be achieved by:
- Contextualizing course content to help learners better understand key concepts.
- Bringing in diverse resources to help learners.
- Guiding learners to move from low-order to high-order thinking exercises.
- Aligning course assignments and activities to measurable learning objectives
With measurable objectives guiding the pathway to higher-order thinking skills, Bloom’s Taxonomy can provide a framework for exploring different levels of thinking and associated skills and competencies, and help guide the development of appropriate course activities.
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework developed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom, which classifies levels of learning into the following categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Each taxonomy highlights different categories of the human thought process, moving from lower-order through to higher-order thinking skills. The taxonomy was revised in the 1990s to use verbs instead of nouns for each level, as follows: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.
Within this framework, consider activities that allow learners to reflect individually and as a group about what they are learning, how they know they are learning, and what is helping and hindering their learning.
Create activities that provide opportunities for learners to be puzzled (the notion of adequate challenge and perplexity), giving them the opportunity to recognize problems and construct knowledge through collaboration and interaction (collaborative inquiry).
References:
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(1).
Refresh Your Course with These Ideas
- Include reflection as part of project assignments. Have learners reflect on the process they went through completing a project, and how that process impacted their learning.
- Create peer review groups to encourage learners to learn from each other, and help each other construct new knowledge.
- Create a scenario based discussion forum, and assign roles to each learner. An example is determining who gets the only available bed in an ICU unit, with roles assigned as hospital administrator, doctor, patient, family member, case worker, etc.
- Have learners present a proposed project or research topic to the class to solicit feedback that they can then integrate that feedback into their own work.
- Create a simple weekly challenge to encourage creative thinking. For example, have learners share one related resource to the module topic, and share why it matters to them, and what value it brings to the course.
Explore More Refreshing Ideas from the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) at the University of Central Florida (UCF)
These Pedagogical Practices from TOPR explore methods and approaches to creating exercises that foster reflection and critical thinking into your online course content to benefit learner success.
Explore Related Resources
Share What You Know
OSCQR has been developed by a community of online practitioners interested in quality course design. There are numerous opportunities for community members to offer suggestions, donate resources, and help with future development.
Discuss this standard in the comments section at the bottom of this page.
Contribute your own ideas or refresh resources by filling out the OSCQR Examples Contribution Form.