Instructor and Student Insights for Gains in Higher Order Thinking Skills

This project aims to serve the national interest by supporting the development of students’ higher order thinking skills in online courses. In particular, the Instructor and Student Insights for Gains in Higher Order Thinking Skills (INSIGHTS) project will pilot complementary dashboards for instructors and students to support their social and cognitive engagement in these settings.

Higher order thinking skills are necessary for the future STEM workforce, as is diverse representation. Since data show that low income and first-generation students tend to enroll in online courses at higher rates than their higher income and continuing generation peers, the aims of this project will add value towards that diversification goal. The project will develop an application that will process discussion board data from online courses to provide instructors with social and cognitive presence representations, as well as appropriate question threads to support individual student needs through the instructor dashboard.

Students will also receive social and cognitive presence representations to promote self-regulated learning through the student dashboard.

INSIGHTS will develop and investigate the utility of complementary instructor- and student-facing learning analytic dashboards (LADs) that leverage student thinking through learning analytics to promote social and cognitive presence and influence higher order thinking skills within STEM courses. This project addresses three key challenges. First, is the inclusion of end-users, namely students and instructors, throughout the design process to improve the LADs’ usability, utility, and user satisfaction.

Second, is the integration of educational theory with artificial intelligence into the design of LADs to support utility of LADs in providing research-based advice to improve instruction through natural language processing of discussion board content. Third, is providing online instructors with support to leverage student thinking to make evidence-based, student-centric, just-in-time instructional adjustments.

The INSIGHTS project will result in broader impacts that include the development and piloting of a user-centric design model that is informed by educational theory to guide the design, piloting, and evaluation of complementary student and instructor facing LADs. This initial model will be modifiable to fit various STEM educational contexts for LAD design including various college settings such as community colleges, other course delivery options such as hybrid and in-person, and other computer-supported collaborative learning strategies.

INSIGHTS will also result in the development of a replicable process to use learning management system digital trace data to conduct social network analysis and AI-supported Bloom’s Taxonomy discourse analysis that results in usable data to design a LAD. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

Through its Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.