Promoting Critical Thinking in Online Discussion Threads : Lessons Learned Teaching Economics

This study investigates factors that promote substantive posts and higher order critical thinking in online discussion. The authors compared weekly discussion threads from two online Principles of Macroeconomics courses taught in 2008 and 2011. The 2008 class was considered a low-structure class while the 2011 class was considered a more structured class. A simple comparison of means indicate that there was an increase in mean substantive posts from 72 percent in 2008 to 89 percent in 2011. There was an increase in the percentage of posts in higher levels of critical thinking from 11 percent in 2008 to 60 percent in 2011. This approach links substantive and quality students' posts to students' understanding of the core learning outcomes for the course using Bloom's taxonomy